A coin bought directly and a coin held through a brokerage account are not quite the same thing, and the gap between them is the subject here. Of the 50 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can measure as of October 21, 2026, 40 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical difference, the median across all of them, is 0.20%. That number is not one cost in particular. It is the fee, the custody arrangement, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever the market happened to pay for the shares rather than for the coin itself, all folded together. It is also the only number on this desk that no sponsor publishes on its own.
The 54 funds on offer cover 12 coins, and where several funds sit on the same coin is where the comparison means something, because the coin's own move is identical for all of them. Bitcoin has 13 funds, a median difference of −0.2%, and 11 of 12 measurable funds within a point of the coin, against a median Bitcoin return of −24.5%. Ether shows the same median difference of −0.2% across 11 funds, with 10 of 11 within a point, against a median Ether return of −37.6%. Solana looks different: a median difference of +1.5% across 9 funds, but only 1 of 8 within a point, against a median Solana return of +39.5%, the widest spread of any coin with multiple funds. XRP sits closest to zero, a median difference of −0.0% across 6 funds, all 6 within a point, with the coin itself up 22.1%. Avalanche, Dogecoin, Sui, Litecoin, Chainlink, Hedera and Polkadot each carry small median differences, mostly within a point, against coin returns that range from Avalanche's +49.3% to Hedera's +19.4%. Stellar's single fund has no comparable data to show.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to compare properly, closing unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. Their difference against the coin reflects the days somebody happened to trade them rather than what the fund actually did over the period, so they are shown here with that caveat rather than placed alongside the rest.
Thirty-two fund-windows cannot have their gap stated by simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded far enough, subtracting one percentage number from another stops describing anything real. $ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% against Ether's own +1,854.4%; subtracting those gives −1,227 percentage points, a number with no meaning. The gap that does mean something is the difference between the two growth factors, which comes to −62.8%, and that is the number the site prints for those windows instead.
Readers can look up any fund's own return, the coin's return over the same window, and the difference between them, on ETFIQ's fund pages.