A coin bought directly and a coin held through a brokerage account rarely cost the same. ETFIQ can measure 46 spot crypto ETFs as of October 12, 2026, and 36 of them finished within a point of the coin they hold. The typical gap, or difference, between what a fund returned and what its coin returned was 0.20%. That gap is not a single, published cost. It is the fee, the expense of the custodian holding the coin, the friction built into how shares are created and redeemed in blocks, and whatever the market happened to pay for the shares rather than for the coin itself, all folded together. No sponsor states this number on its own; it only shows up when the fund's return is set against the coin's.
Nine coins are spread across 48 funds, and coins with more than one fund attached are where this becomes worth reading. The coin's own move over the period is identical for every fund that holds it, so any spread between those funds comes entirely from what each one costs to hold, not from the coin. Bitcoin, with 13 funds, had a median difference of −0.1% over one year, with 11 of 12 measurable funds landing within a point. Ether's 11 funds show the same median difference, −0.1%, with 10 of 11 within a point. Solana looks different: across 8 funds the median difference was +1.6%, and only 1 of 8 landed within a point of the coin, with individual fund differences over three months ranging from +1.0% to +2.0% among names including BSOL, SOLC, SOEZ, TSOL, FSOL, VSOL, MSOL and QSOL. XRP's 6 funds all sat within a point of the coin, with a median difference of −0.2%. Avalanche, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Chainlink and Polkadot each carry fewer funds, with median differences ranging from −0.3% to +0.7%.
Two trusts are flagged as too thinly traded to compare on equal terms: they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty, which means their quoted difference against the coin reflects the days someone happened to trade rather than a day-by-day record of what the fund did. ETFIQ publishes their numbers alongside everything else but does not rank them against the more liquid funds.
A further 25 fund-windows cannot have their gap stated by simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded over a long enough stretch, subtracting one percentage return from another stops describing anything real. ETHE, for instance, returned +627.8% since January 2020 while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%. Subtracting those two numbers gives −1,227 points, a number with no meaning. For these windows ETFIQ instead reports the gap between the two growth factors compounded, which for ETHE comes to −62.8%, and that compounded number is what appears on the site in place of a subtraction.
Readers can look up any fund's ticker on ETFIQ's fund pages to see its own difference against its coin, the period it was measured over, and whether that number came from simple subtraction or, where compounding made subtraction meaningless, from the compounded gap instead.