Bitcoin ETFs

Why a fund changed everything

For its first fifteen years, owning bitcoin meant doing something unfamiliar: opening an account at a crypto exchange, or learning to guard a string of secret words. That was fine for enthusiasts. It was a wall for the trillions of dollars managed by financial advisers, pension funds and ordinary retirement accounts, most of which can only buy things that trade on a stock exchange.

A spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund removes the wall. The fund buys real bitcoin and locks it away with a custodian. Shares in the fund trade on the stock market like any other. An investor gets the price exposure through the brokerage account they already have, without ever touching a key.

Bitcoiners spent a decade asking US regulators to allow one. When approval finally came, on 10 January 2024, the result was the most successful fund launch in history. It also changed who owns bitcoin, and started an argument, still running, about whether a system built to remove middlemen is improved by adding the biggest middlemen on earth.

The ten-year road

1. July 2013: the first filing. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, already large holders, file with the SEC for the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust. Bitcoin is trading around $100.
2. 2013 to 2020: the workaround. Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Investment Trust, later called GBTC, offers the next best thing: a private trust whose shares eventually trade over the counter. Because shares cannot be redeemed for bitcoin, their price drifts far from the value of the coins, at times 40 percent above and later more than 40 percent below.
3. March 2017 and July 2018: no, and no again. The SEC rejects the Winklevoss fund twice. Its reasoning barely changes over the following years and a dozen-plus applications: bitcoin trades on unregulated venues, so a fund could be manipulated, and no exchange has a surveillance-sharing agreement with a regulated market of significant size. Commissioner Hester Peirce dissents.
4. February 2021: Canada goes first. The Purpose Bitcoin ETF launches in Toronto and gathers a billion dollars within a month.
5. October 2021: futures, but not spot. The SEC allows ETFs that hold bitcoin futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. ProShares’ BITO launches on 19 October. Futures funds must keep rolling contracts, which costs money and causes them to lag the real price.
6. June 2022: Grayscale sues. The SEC refuses to let GBTC convert into an ETF. Grayscale takes it to court, arguing that it is irrational to approve a fund based on futures prices and reject one based on the spot prices those futures track.
7. June 2023: BlackRock files. The world’s largest asset manager applies for a spot fund. Fidelity, Invesco, WisdomTree and others refile within days.
8. 29 August 2023: the court agrees with Grayscale. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit rules unanimously that the SEC’s denial was “arbitrary and capricious”. The regulator does not appeal.
9. 9 January 2024: a false start. The SEC’s account on X is compromised and posts a fake approval. The price jumps and falls back within minutes.
10. 10 January 2024: the real thing. The SEC approves eleven spot bitcoin products at once. Chair Gary Gensler’s statement notes that the commission did not approve or endorse bitcoin itself. Trading begins the next morning, with more than $4 billion changing hands on day one.

Every US spot bitcoin ETF

All of these funds do the same job: hold bitcoin and nothing else. They differ in fee, size, how easily their shares trade, and who guards the coins. Click a column heading to sort.

Sponsor fees are the standing rates reported by NerdWallet (updated 5 October 2026) and bitcoinetf.directory (2 September 2026); all launch-period fee waivers had expired by then. Bitcoin held is from Bitbo’s treasuries tracker, 9 October 2026, rounded; “n/a” means the tracker did not list the fund separately. Custodians are the primary bitcoin custodians named in fund documents; several funds have added secondary custodians. Always confirm current details in the fund’s own prospectus.

Notes on the list

• Why is GBTC so expensive? It is the original trust from 2013, converted to an ETF in January 2024. Many long-time holders would owe tax on large gains if they switched, which lets Grayscale keep the fee high. In July 2024 Grayscale spun off a low-cost sibling, the Bitcoin Mini Trust, under the ticker BTC.
• The newcomer. Morgan Stanley’s MSBT began trading on 8 April 2026, the first spot bitcoin fund issued by a major US bank, with the lowest fee in the group. An analyst at Bloomberg placed its debut in the top one percent of ETF launches.
• The late convert. Osprey’s trust, which had traded over the counter since 2021, became an exchange-listed ETF on Nasdaq on 19 December 2025.
• The one that closed. Hashdex’s DEFI, a former futures fund that switched to holding spot bitcoin in March 2024, never gathered much money. With about $14.7 million in assets it stopped trading on 17 August 2026 and returned cash to shareholders. Small funds closing is routine in the ETF business; holders get the value of their shares, though a forced sale can trigger tax.
• Not on this list: funds that hold futures, leveraged or inverse funds, covered-call funds, multi-coin funds, and shares of companies that hold bitcoin. Those are different products with different risks.

Issuer pages for the largest funds: IBIT, FBTC, GBTC, BTC, BITB, ARKB, HODL, OBTC. This site describes funds; it does not recommend any of them.

How a spot ETF works

Creation and redemption

An ETF’s share count is not fixed. When demand for shares pushes their price above the value of the bitcoin behind them, large trading firms called authorised participants step in. They deliver assets to the fund and receive newly created shares, which they sell at the higher market price. When shares trade below the value of the bitcoin, they do the reverse: buy cheap shares, hand them back to the fund and receive assets. This arbitrage is what keeps an ETF’s price within a hair of its holdings, and it is what GBTC lacked for a decade.

Cash versus in-kind

At launch the SEC insisted on cash creations. An authorised participant handed over dollars and the fund itself went out and bought bitcoin. That kept Wall Street banks from handling the coins directly, but added cost and delay. On 29 July 2025, under a new chair, the SEC approved in-kind creation and redemption, the standard for commodity funds: participants can deliver or receive bitcoin itself. It made the funds cheaper to run and their prices tighter.

Custody

The coins sit with a custodian, mostly in cold storage: keys kept offline, split across locations, requiring several people to sign. Coinbase is the primary custodian for most US funds, a concentration critics regularly point to. Fidelity uses its own custody arm. VanEck’s fund uses Gemini. Since 2025 several issuers have added second custodians such as Anchorage, BitGo or BNY.

Price and fees

Each fund calculates its net asset value once a day from a benchmark built from prices on major exchanges. Shares trade only during stock market hours, while bitcoin trades all night and all weekend, so an ETF can open on Monday at a very different price from Friday’s close. The sponsor fee is taken by selling a sliver of the fund’s bitcoin over time, so each share represents slightly less bitcoin every year.

How big they have become

Figures move daily. These are the most recent that could be verified, with their dates.

The flows have not been a one-way street. The funds took in tens of billions of dollars across 2024 and 2025. During the decline of early 2026 they saw months of steady redemptions, and net flows for the year only turned positive again in late September, after the largest single-day inflow of 2026, close to a billion dollars, on 21 September. ETF investors turned out to be neither the “diamond hands” that optimists predicted nor the stampede for the exit that pessimists feared.

The effect on ownership is covered on the holders page.

Options and the products built on top

Options on spot bitcoin ETFs began trading on 19 November 2024, starting with IBIT. Options let investors hedge, generate income or make leveraged bets, and their arrival is one reason large institutions became more comfortable holding the funds. Within months IBIT’s options market was among the most active of any ETF.

A second generation of products has since been stacked on the first: covered-call funds that sell options on bitcoin ETFs to pay monthly income, “buffer” funds that cap gains in exchange for limiting losses, and leveraged funds that aim for twice the daily move. These are more complex than a plain spot fund and can behave in ways that surprise their holders, especially over long periods.

In September 2025 the SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based funds, which removed the need for a case-by-case ruling on each new crypto product and opened the door to a wave of funds tracking other tokens.

ETF or your own keys?

These are different things that happen to track the same price. Neither is right for everyone.

Many people use both: an ETF inside a retirement account and a self-custody wallet for coins they want to control. The practical side of the second is in buying and storing.

Outside the United States

The gatekeepers gave way

Approval by the SEC was only the first door. For most of 2024, the big US brokerages and “wirehouses” would let clients buy the funds only if the client asked, and would not let their advisers suggest them. One by one, those policies fell.

• Vanguard, which had refused to offer the funds at all, opened its platform to crypto ETFs in early December 2025.
• Morgan Stanley went from permitting its roughly 16,000 advisers to recommend a small allocation to launching its own fund in April 2026.
• JPMorgan, whose chief executive remains bitcoin’s best-known critic in banking, serves as an authorised participant and has said it will let clients buy.

The people behind these decisions, from Larry Fink to Hester Peirce, are profiled in the directory. The arguments about whether so much bitcoin in so few custodians is healthy are on the risks page.