A coin bought directly and a coin held through a brokerage account are not quite the same thing, and the gap between them is what this desk tries to measure. Across the 46 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can compare on October 9, 2026, 37 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical difference, the median across all of them, was 0.20%. That gap is not a single cost. It bundles the fee the fund charges, what custody adds, the friction of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever the market happened to pay for the shares that day rather than for the coin itself. No sponsor publishes that number directly; it only shows up when the two returns are set side by side.
The 48 funds split across nine coins, and where several funds track the same coin, the comparison does some work. The coin's own move is identical for all of them over the same window, so whatever separates the funds is what each one cost to hold. Bitcoin had the largest group, 13 funds, with a median difference of −0.2% and all 12 measurable funds landing within a point of Bitcoin's −32.0% median return. Ether's 11 funds showed a similar pattern, median difference −0.1%, all 11 within a point of Ether's −43.0% return. Solana told a different story: all 8 Solana funds finished more than a point away from the coin, with a median difference of +1.5% against a median coin return of +39.2%, meaning every one of them logged something other than a clean pass-through of Solana's move. XRP's six funds held closer, median difference −0.3%, all within a point. Avalanche's three funds split two within a point and one outside, with a median difference of +1.0%. Dogecoin's three funds all sat within a point, median difference −0.1%. The single-fund coins, Litecoin, Chainlink and Polkadot, each have only one reading to report rather than a spread.
Two trusts are shown without being ranked. They traded thinly enough to close unchanged on more than one day in twenty, which means their quoted difference against the coin reflects the days somebody actually traded rather than a full account of what the fund did over the period. They are published with that caveat attached rather than placed alongside the rest.
Twenty-four fund-windows could not state their gap as a subtraction at all. Once a return compounds far enough, subtracting one total return from another stops meaning anything: Ether's Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, since January 2020, returned +627.8% while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%, a subtraction that produces -1,227 points and describes nothing real. For those windows the site instead publishes the gap between the two growth factors, which for that fund over that period comes to −62.8%. That is the number that appears on the page in place of the simple difference, and it is noted which method applies in each case.
Readers can look up any ticker on ETFIQ's fund pages to see its own difference against its coin, the window it was measured over, and whether that fund falls among the ones compared by subtraction or by compounded gap.