A coin bought on an exchange and a coin held through a brokerage account are not quite the same thing, and the gap between them is what ETFIQ measures across 50 spot crypto ETFs it can compare as of October 22, 2026. Of those, 38 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical fund sat 0.30% away from its coin, a number that folds in the fee, the custody cost, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever buyers and sellers paid for the shares rather than the coin on a given day. It is the one number here no sponsor publishes on its own fact sheet.
The twelve coins behind these funds are not evenly covered. Bitcoin has 13 funds and a median difference of −0.2%, with 11 of 12 measurable funds landing within a point; the median Bitcoin return over the window was −24.5%. Ether, with 11 funds, shows a median difference of −0.1% and 10 of 11 within a point, against a median coin return of −37.3%. Solana looks different: across 9 funds the median difference is +1.6%, and only 1 of 8 measurable funds came within a point of Solana's own +36.8% median return. Avalanche shows a similar pattern, a +1.1% median difference and 1 of 3 within a point. XRP, Dogecoin, and Sui each show every fund within a point of the coin, with median differences of −0.4%, −0.1%, and +0.0% respectively. Single-fund coins, Chainlink, Hedera, Polkadot, carry one reading each rather than a median across funds, and Stellar has no data to show at all.
Looking at individual funds, the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) and the Canary Marinade Solana ETF (SOLC) each closed 1.9% ahead of Solana's 36.8% three-month return, while the Bitwise Chainlink ETF (CLNK) closed 1.4% behind Chainlink's 41.3% three-month return, the widest gap on the table. Several Bitcoin funds, including HODL from VanEck, closed within a tenth of a point of Bitcoin's year, while GBTC, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF, sat 1.1% behind over the same period.
Two trusts, among them GSUI's close relative Stellar's single fund, are quoted too thinly to read this way; they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty, so their difference reflects the days somebody traded rather than what the fund actually did, and ETFIQ shows them without ranking them against the rest.
Separately, 35 fund-windows cannot state a gap by subtraction once either return has compounded enough that the subtraction stops meaning anything. ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% against Ether's own +1,854.4%, a subtraction of −1,227 points that describes nothing real; the number ETFIQ prints instead is the compounded gap of −62.8%, built from the ratio of growth factors rather than their difference.
Readers can check any fund's own difference, its coin, and which window it was measured over on that fund's page at ETFIQ.