A coin bought on an exchange and a coin held inside an ETF are not quite the same thing to own, and the tables here put a number on the space between them. Across the 46 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can measure as of October 13, 2026, 35 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical fund sat 0.20% away from its own coin. That gap is not a mistake. It is the fee, the cost of custody, and the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, all folded into one number that no sponsor publishes on its own.
The 9 coins covered span 48 fund listings, and Bitcoin and Ether carry the most company, 13 and 11 funds respectively. With Bitcoin, the coin itself returned −28.2% over the period measured, and 11 of 12 comparable funds landed within a point of that, for a median difference of −0.2%. Ether's 11 funds were even tighter, all 11 within a point, with a median difference of −0.1% against the coin's −41.1%. When every fund on a coin clusters this close together, the coin's move explains almost all of the fund's return, and the small residual is what holding it actually cost.
Solana tells a different story. Its coin return was +39.3%, but only 1 of 8 funds tracking it finished within a point, and the median difference was +1.6%. Avalanche shows the same pattern in miniature: 0 of 3 funds within a point, a median difference of +1.1% against the coin's +53.7%. Individual rows show where that spread comes from. Canary's SOLC returned +41.2% against Solana's +39.3%, a difference of +1.9% over three months, while Invesco's QSOL returned +40.0%, a difference of +0.7% over the same three months and the same coin move. Both funds held the identical rise in Solana. What separated them was what each fund cost to hold over that stretch.
Two trusts, XRPR among them structurally similar to other thinly quoted names, are flagged as quoted too thinly to compare, meaning they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. Their listed difference against the coin reflects the days someone actually traded the shares rather than a continuous measure of fund performance, and ETFIQ publishes that distinction rather than placing them in rank alongside the rest.
A separate set of 25 fund-windows cannot be stated as a simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded far enough, subtracting two percentages produces nonsense: ETHE's +627.8% since January 2020 against Ether's +1,854.4% subtracts to −1,227 points, a number with no meaning. For these cases ETFIQ publishes the gap between the two growth factors instead, which for ETHE over that span comes to −62.8%. That number, not the raw subtraction, is what appears on the site for any fund-window where compounding has moved past the point where simple subtraction still describes it.
Readers who want to see how a specific fund compares with its coin, over one year, three months, or since launch, can look up that fund's row and method note on ETFIQ's fund pages.