A coin bought on an exchange and the same coin held inside a brokerage account rarely finish a period at the same number, and the gap between the two is what this snapshot measures. Of 46 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can measure on October 16, 2026, 36 came within a point of the coin they hold, and the median difference across all of them was 0.20%. That number stands in for the fee, the custody arrangement, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever else separated the price of the shares from the price of the coin, all folded into one number that no sponsor publishes directly.
The pattern varies by coin. Bitcoin funds and Ether funds cluster tightly: 11 of 12 Bitcoin funds and all 11 Ether funds landed within a point of their coin, with median differences of −0.1% each. XRP funds were similarly close, 6 of 6 within a point and a median difference of −0.2%. Solana tells a different story. Across 8 funds tracking Solana, only 1 came within a point of the coin's own +37.6% return, and the median difference was +1.4%, meaning the typical Solana fund in this set outran the coin it holds. Avalanche shows the same shape on a smaller sample: 1 of 3 funds within a point, median difference +1.2%. Dogecoin, Litecoin, Chainlink, and Polkadot each have one or a handful of funds and sit closer to their coin, though the sample sizes are too small to generalize from.
Looking at individual rows, the funds nearest their coin over the stated window include HODL, matching Bitcoin's −24.7% return exactly, and XRP (the Bitwise fund) doing the same against XRP's −44.3%. At the other end, GBTC shows a −1.1% difference against Bitcoin's −24.7%, the widest gap among the Bitcoin rows. Among Solana funds, BSOL shows the largest positive difference at +2.0% against Solana's +37.6%, with several other Solana funds spaced closely behind it, all measured against the same three-month coin return, which is what makes the comparison among them meaningful.
Two trusts in this dataset are quoted too thinly to compare on this basis. They closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty, which means their difference against the coin reflects the days somebody happened to trade rather than what the fund itself did over the full period. They are shown here without being ranked against the rest.
Separately, 24 fund-windows cannot have their gap stated by subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded far enough, as with ETHE's since-launch return of +627.8% against Ether's +1,854.4%, subtracting the two percentages produces a number, −1,227 points, that describes nothing real. For those windows the site instead publishes the gap between the two growth factors, which for ETHE comes to −62.8%, and that compounded number is what appears rather than a plain subtraction.
Readers can look up any fund's ticker on ETFIQ's fund pages to see its own difference number, the window it was measured over, and whether that fund falls among the ones flagged as thinly quoted or compounded.