A coin held in a brokerage account does not quite move the way the coin itself moves, and the gap between the two is the subject of this reading. Of the 49 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can measure as of October 20, 2026, 40 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical fund across the set sat 0.20% from its coin. That gap is the fee, the custody arrangement, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever else separated what the market paid for the shares from what it paid for the coin, bundled into one number. It is also the one number on this page that no sponsor publishes directly.
Twelve coins are spread across 54 funds, and where several funds sit on the same coin, the comparison has something to say. Bitcoin carries 13 funds with a median difference of −0.2% and 11 of 12 measurable funds within a point; the median Bitcoin return over the window was −25.6%. Ether's 11 funds also carry a median difference of −0.2%, all 11 within a point, against a median coin return of −38.9%. Solana is the outlier worth noting: across 9 funds the median difference was +1.5%, with only 1 of 8 measurable funds landing within a point, against a median coin return of +36.2%. XRP's 6 funds carried a median difference of −0.2%, all 6 within a point, on a median coin return of +14.8%. The smaller groups, Avalanche, Dogecoin, Sui, Litecoin, Chainlink, Hedera, Polkadot, and Stellar, are listed with their own medians and fund counts in the table, with Stellar's single fund unmeasurable over this window.
At the fund level, the closest readings cluster near zero: XRP's Bitwise XRP ETF matched its coin's −47.4% return to within +0.0%, and VanEck's Bitcoin ETF, HODL, landed its −25.6% against the coin's identical number, a −0.0% gap. At the other end, Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust ETF, GBTC, returned −26.7% against the coin's −25.6%, a difference of −1.1%, and Bitwise's Chainlink ETF returned +40.4% against the coin's +41.5%, also a −1.1% gap.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to compare on this basis, closing unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty; their differences describe the days somebody traded rather than what the fund did over the period, and they are shown with that caveat rather than placed alongside the rest.
Thirty-two fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction once either return has compounded far enough: ETHE since launch in January 2020 returned +627.8% against Ether's +1,854.4%, a subtraction that produces -1,227 points and states nothing useful. For those windows the site prints the gap between the two growth factors instead, which for ETHE and Ether since January 2020 comes to -62.8%.
Readers can look up any fund's row on ETFIQ's fund pages to see its own difference, the window it was measured over, and whether that window allowed a simple subtraction or required the compounded-gap calculation instead.