A coin bought on an exchange and the same coin held through a brokerage account rarely close out the same. ETFIQ can measure 43 spot crypto ETFs as of October 8, 2026, and 34 of them finished within a point of the coin they hold. The typical gap, taken across all measurable funds, is 0.50%. That number is not one single fee. It is the expense ratio, the cost of custody, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever buyers and sellers happened to pay for the shares that day rather than for the coin itself, all folded together. No sponsor publishes this number directly; it only shows up once the fund's return is set against the coin's.
Nine coins are spread across 48 exchange-traded funds, and the coins with several funds attached are where the comparison does real work. Because the coin's own move is identical for every fund that holds it, whatever separates those funds' returns is, by construction, the cost of holding them rather than the coin. Solana carries eight funds with a median difference of +0.7% and seven of the eight within a point of the coin's own +40.4% return. Bitcoin's 13 funds cluster tightly around a median difference of −0.2%, with 11 of 12 measurable funds within a point of Bitcoin's −33.8%. Ether's 11 funds show a median of −0.3%, all 11 within a point of Ether's −45.4%. XRP stands apart: across six funds the median difference is −1.3%, and none of the five measurable funds landed within a point of XRP's +26.2%, meaning every one of them gave something back relative to the coin itself. Litecoin's lone measurable fund, Canary's LTCC, differs by −2.4% against Litecoin's +44.2%.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to compare on equal footing, closing unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. Their difference against the coin reflects the days somebody actually traded rather than what the fund did on every day it existed, so ETFIQ publishes those numbers with that caveat attached rather than ranking them alongside the rest.
A separate set of 24 fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded over enough time, subtracting one percentage number from another stops describing anything real. The clearest case is $ETHE since January 2020: the fund returned +627.8% while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%. Subtracting those two numbers gives −1,227 points, a number with no meaning. The gap that does mean something is the compounded one, −62.8%, and that is the number the site prints for these longer windows.
On the live desk, a reader can look up any single ticker from these tables and see its fund return, its coin's return, and the difference between them recalculated against that day's closes, along with a note on which measurement method applies.