A spot crypto ETF is supposed to do one thing: track the coin it holds, after fees and the mechanics of running a fund. On Oct 19, 2026, ETFIQ measured 50 such funds, and 39 of them finished within a point of their coin's return over the window used for that fund. The median difference across all of them is 0.20%, a number that folds together the fee, the cost of custody, and whatever friction comes from creating and redeeming shares in blocks rather than trading the coin directly. It is the one number on this page the sponsor does not publish.
Twelve coins are held across 55 funds, and where several funds hold the same coin, the comparison is cleaner: the coin's move is identical for all of them, so what separates the funds is what each one costs to hold. Bitcoin and Ether each have the largest rosters, 13 and 11 funds, with median differences of −0.1% and 11 of 12 and 10 of 11 landing within a point of the coin. Among individual funds, VanEck's HODL matched its coin exactly over the past year at −23.2% against −23.2%, and Bitwise's XRP fund did the same at −43.4% against −43.4%. At the other end, Grayscale's GBTC showed the widest single gap on the list, −24.3% against Bitcoin's −23.2%, a difference of −1.1%, and Bitwise's Chainlink fund, CLNK, came in at +37.7% against +38.7%, a difference of −1.0%.
Solana funds behave differently as a group. Of eight measurable Solana funds, only one landed within a point of the coin's own +33.9% return, and the median difference across Solana funds is +1.4%, the only coin on the list where the median runs positive and wide. BSOL, SOLC, FSOL, TSOL and SOEZ all closed ahead of the coin itself over three months, by between +1.3% and +1.8%. Avalanche funds also ran ahead of their coin, with VanEck's VAVX at +46.0% against Avalanche's +44.9%.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to compare on equal terms: they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty, so their difference against the coin reflects the days somebody happened to trade rather than what the fund actually did over the full window. They are shown with that caveat rather than ranked alongside the rest.
Thirty-four fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded over a long enough stretch, subtracting two percentages stops meaning anything. ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%; subtracting those is a gap of −1,227 points, a number with no real meaning. For those cases ETFIQ instead publishes the compounded gap between the two growth factors, which for ETHE's full history comes to −62.8%.
Readers can look up any fund's 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 39 within a point or among those where only the compounded gap applies.