Canadian Bitcoin ETFs Compared: Fees, Units, Custody

On C$10,000, the expense ratios that Canadian bitcoin ETFs have published work out to between C$33 and C$154 a year, and one of the seven funds covered here is a closed-end fund that was trading about 6.5% below its net asset value on October 21, 2026. Fees are only the first difference. The units come in Canadian dollars, hedged Canadian dollars and US dollars, five of the six sponsors' documents name a Coinbase company somewhere in the custody chain, and one fund holds shares of a US fund rather than coins.

Every figure below comes from an issuer page, ETF Facts, prospectus or one securities regulator decision, and each carries the date of its source. Nothing here is a ranking. Our companion guide to how spot bitcoin ETFs hold their bitcoin explains the mechanics that apply to all of them.

The seven funds, in the order they started

The table lists each fund by the start date its own documents give, earliest first, so that the order carries no judgment. Tickers and unit currencies are as of October 23, 2026. It is not a complete list of every Canadian crypto product: income-oriented and multi-asset funds exist (Purpose lists a Bitcoin Yield ETF and CI a Multi-Crypto ETF) and are left out. These seven are the ones whose documents say they hold bitcoin directly, or hold a US bitcoin trust.

Start dates in the sources do not always agree with each other. Evolve's product page gives February 17, 2021 as the inception date while its ETF Facts says February 19, and Purpose's page uses February 23, 2021 for the return history while its ETF Facts says February 25. The table uses the ETF Facts date where one exists, and the point is only the order.

The ETF Facts for Purpose, Evolve, CI and Fidelity all describe the fund as an alternative mutual fund under National Instrument 81-102, and the Ontario Securities Commission decision for the iShares fund uses the same label. The Evolve document explains what that permits: "the ability to borrow cash to use for investment purposes and increased ability to invest in commodities." We did not test whether any of the funds uses that borrowing power. The label matters mainly because it puts these funds under a different rulebook from conventional mutual funds.

The headline fee is not what the fund costs

Every fund advertises a management fee. The figure that reaches unit holders is the management expense ratio, or MER, which adds operating costs and sales tax. The tables below put both side by side with the date of the MER, because the dates differ by more than a year.

Fees and size, as of October 23, 2026 (each cell dated)

Three notes on reading it. First, "computed" for QBTC and BTCQ means we divided the units outstanding on 3iQ's page by its units-per-bitcoin figure (3,638,455 / 1,024.46 and 13,223,454 / 6,459.98); it is arithmetic on published numbers, not a reported holding. Second, net assets are in different currencies and on different dates, so the column is not a size ranking. The CI ETF Facts reports its total value as US$801.06 million at May 31, 2026, because the fund's base currency is the US dollar, while the CI web page quotes Canadian dollars. Third, Evolve's page shows a 0.75% fee in its fee field and a 1.00% figure in a separate block that also says "Listing Date Coming Soon", which reads like a leftover template; the ETF Facts MER is the number to hold on to.

MER against the headline fee, in dollars

The ratio between the two figures varies a lot. The table divides each MER by the fee shown beside it and converts the MER to dollars on C$10,000. The MER dates differ, so this is a description of each document, not a like-for-like contest.

What sits between the two numbers is described differently by each issuer. The Evolve and Purpose ETF Facts both say the MER is the total of the management fee and operating expenses, and both add that the manager waived some expenses, so the MER "would have been higher" without the waiver. CI states that its MER includes HST, GST and QST. BlackRock's fact sheet says the same about GST/HST and adds that the MER "includes the fund's proportionate share of the MER, if any, of any underlying fund", which matters for a fund that holds another fund (see the structure section below). The trading expense ratio is separate: Purpose reports 0.02% and Evolve 0.01%, taking Purpose to a total of 1.31% and Evolve to 1.55% of net asset value in their ETF Facts. Purpose's 1.31% is therefore the MER of 1.29% plus trading costs, and we use 1.29% as the MER.

Fidelity's own documents show how an MER lags a fee change. Its August 25, 2025 ETF Facts reports a 0.40% MER at June 30, 2025, and its fact sheet says that after the January 13, 2025 cut the MER "will be lower going forward". The product page now shows 0.35% at March 31, 2026. An MER describes a past reporting period, so a fee cut reaches it only gradually, and a fee quoted from an older article may no longer be current. For a closed-end fund like QBTC, the page shows only the 1.95% management fee, so the table does not claim an all-in number for it.

What the letters after the ticker mean

A Canadian-listed unit is not automatically a unit whose return is in Canadian dollars with the currency risk removed. The funds' documents describe the exposure the same way: the Evolve ETF Facts say the objective is exposure to "the daily price movements of the U.S. dollar price of bitcoin", the 3iQ pages use the same wording, BlackRock's benchmark is the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, a US dollar price, and CI's ETF Facts states that its base currency is the US dollar. The Canadian-dollar unit of an unhedged fund therefore moves with two things multiplied together:

unit value in CAD = bitcoin per unit x bitcoin price in USD x USD/CAD rate

If the US dollar gains on the Canadian dollar, the CAD unit of an unhedged fund gains. If it loses, the unit loses, even with a flat bitcoin price. The USD/CAD rate here means Canadian dollars per one US dollar, so a rise is a stronger US dollar.

The unit types, by document

For iShares and 3iQ we are reporting what the documents we fetched do not say. We did not find the iShares prospectus text on whether the CAD units are hedged, so we leave the hedging status of those units open.

CI's prospectus spells out what the hedged series are and are not. They are "substantially hedged using derivative instruments such as forward foreign currency contracts", and they "do not offer the exact same return as their equivalent unhedged series". The document adds that over-hedged or under-hedged positions can arise and that "the costs associated with a hedging program may outweigh the benefits". A hedged unit trades a currency exposure for a different set of costs and tracking differences.

How much does the currency leg move?

Bitcoin's own price move is the larger leg of that product and the exchange rate is the smaller one. We measured the smaller one from two public data sets: the Bank of Canada's daily USD/CAD series and the Coin Metrics community bitcoin reference price. For the twelve months from October 22, 2025 to October 22, 2026:

In that particular year, the currency leg was a rounding error against the bitcoin move: an unhedged and a hedged unit would differ by about 0.14 percentage points, before the hedged series' own costs. That is one year, and although the rate ended almost where it began, it ranged between 1.3515 (January 29, 2026) and 1.4271 (October 9, 2026) in between, so the date of a purchase or sale mattered. The longer record shows the swings the currency leg can add. The table below covers every Bank of Canada publication date from January 2, 2018 to October 22, 2026 and measures the change in USD/CAD over the preceding twelve months. There are 2,196 such windows, and they overlap heavily, so they are not 2,196 independent observations.

The calendar-year changes from the same series run from +8.79% in 2024 to -4.79% in 2019 (2018 +8.74%, 2019 -4.79%, 2020 -1.97%, 2021 -0.42%, 2022 +6.83%, 2023 -2.35%, 2024 +8.79%, 2025 -4.75%). A hypothetical shows what that means for a unit. Suppose bitcoin's USD price is unchanged and USD/CAD falls from 1.40 to 1.33, a 5.00% drop: an unhedged CAD unit worth C$10,000 becomes C$9,500, and a perfectly hedged unit stays near C$10,000 before hedging costs. Reverse the move and the unhedged unit gains. The currency leg adds a second source of change that cuts both ways. In the series above, about three-quarters of the twelve-month windows moved less than 5% either way, and over the last year the bitcoin leg was about ten times as volatile as the currency leg (43.29% against 4.03%). For a sense of the bitcoin leg itself, see our measured piece on bitcoin volatility and drawdowns.

A way to check a unit's price yourself

Because the unit value is a product of three numbers, you can reconstruct it. Take the bitcoin-per-unit figure the issuer publishes, multiply by a bitcoin reference price and by USD/CAD, and compare with the published price. We did this for six units, using Coin Metrics prices and Bank of Canada rates.

The gaps stay within half a percent because the inputs are not timestamped alike: Coin Metrics prices are daily values, the Bank of Canada rate is a daily average, and the funds value their bitcoin at their own cut-off, often a 4:00 p.m. Eastern reference. The method is therefore a sanity check and not an audit. We left out the hedged BTCC unit on purpose. Its CAD value is tied to a forward-contract rate rather than the day's spot rate, so the same formula gives a 2% gap (13.86 against a NAV of 14.14) that says nothing about the fund. The table also shows why unit prices are not comparable across funds: a FBTC unit holds about 0.00033 bitcoin and a BTCC.B unit about 0.00014, so price per unit says nothing about cost.

Who holds the bitcoin

The chain of custody differs by issuer. The table is built from each issuer's own legal documents, and the dates matter because the arrangements change.

Counting names: a Coinbase company appears in the documents of five of the six sponsor families (Purpose, Evolve, CI, 3iQ and iShares through the US trust), and Cidel is the custodian for three (Purpose, Evolve and CI). Fidelity is the exception, using its own digital asset custody entity under a Canadian dealer. The documents we read do not quantify how much of the sector's bitcoin sits with any one provider.

Two attributions deserve care. The iShares row rests on the Ontario Securities Commission's exemption decision of November 12, 2024, which was written before the fund launched and uses the future tense: the fund's custodian "will be" State Street Trust Company Canada. The iShares fact sheet, dated September 2026, confirms the fund holds the US trust's shares, and the Canadian product page describes Coinbase Prime as a prime broker of Coinbase, Inc., which it calls an affiliate of the US trust's custodian, which is consistent with the decision. We did not find a current Canadian prospectus statement of the fund's custodian, so read the row as what the regulator was told, not what a 2026 filing says. The Purpose row combines two documents: the August 2025 prospectus lists Gemini and the Coinbase entities, and a July 21, 2026 release adds Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., described there as effective from that date.

What the documents say about loss protection is also worth reading directly. CI's prospectus states that neither the ETFs nor their custodians "will maintain insurance against risk of loss of the Digital Assets held by the Crypto ETFs, as such insurance is not currently available in Canada on economically reasonable terms", and that the sub-custodians carry their own coverage, whose amounts and availability "are subject to change at the sole discretion" of the sub-custodians. The same prospectus notes that the subadvisor and the sub-custodians are resident outside Canada, so enforcing legal rights against them in Canada may be hard. Fidelity's prospectus says its sub-custodian is a trust company licensed by the New York State Department of Financial Services and describes professional liability insurance with amounts the sub-custodian may change.

Three structures: coins, a US fund, and a closed-end fund

The seven funds are built in three different ways, and the difference shows up in the documents' fine print.

Funds that hold bitcoin directly (Purpose, Evolve, CI, 3iQ BTCQ, Fidelity). The ETF Facts for Purpose, Evolve and CI list bitcoin as 99.9% to 100% of the portfolio, Fidelity's August 2025 ETF Facts showed 99.78% bitcoin and 0.22% cash at June 30, 2025, and 3iQ's page describes 100% bitcoin exposure that "may be lower due to a small cash balance". Evolve's ETF Facts point to the creation and redemption process of the ETF structure as the mechanism behind its tracking. BTCQ's price of C$18.37 against a NAV per unit of C$18.3483 on October 21, 2026 was a premium of 0.12%, and BTCQ.U's US$13.08 against US$13.0622 was 0.14%.

A fund that holds a US fund (iShares IBIT). The Canadian iShares ETF holds shares of the US-listed iShares Bitcoin Trust. The September 2026 fact sheet shows the trust at 99.98% of the portfolio. The OSC decision made this possible by granting relief from sections 2.1 and 2.5 of NI 81-102, and it attached a condition: the Canadian fund "will not pay any management or incentive fees in connection with an investment in IBIT Shares which to a reasonable person would duplicate a fee payable by IBIT for the same service." What that does to the all-in cost is not settled by anything we read. BlackRock's Canadian fact sheet gives a 0.32% management fee and a 0.33% MER and defines the MER as including a proportionate share of any underlying fund's MER. The US trust's own page lists a 0.25% sponsor fee. We did not find a document that says whether that 0.25% sits inside the 0.33% or on top of it, so we use the published 0.33% and do not add the two figures. The Canadian prospectus is the document that answers it.

A closed-end fund (3iQ QBTC). QBTC's own page calls it a closed-end fund. Its units trade on the TSX at a price that can differ from NAV in a way ETF units are meant not to. On October 21, 2026, the page showed a price of C$108.00 against a NAV per unit of C$115.562, a price 6.54% below NAV, and US$77.77 against US$82.2685 for QBTC.U, 5.47% below. That is a one-day snapshot from the fund's own page, not a statistic about QBTC's history. Whether and how its units can be redeemed is set out in its prospectus and annual information form, which we did not review. The mechanics of why a price drifts from NAV are in our guide to bitcoin ETF premiums and discounts.

What a Canadian listing costs against US-listed IBIT after conversion

A Canadian holder choosing between a TSX-listed fund and the US-listed iShares Bitcoin Trust faces a question that fee tables alone cannot answer: converting Canadian dollars into US dollars. The calculation below is hypothetical and rests on stated inputs. It uses published figures only, holds the bitcoin price flat to isolate costs, assumes zero commissions, and applies annual fees to the initial C$10,000.

Inputs (all as of October 23, 2026 unless stated):

The conversion cost of a round trip, from Canadian dollars into US dollars and back, is 1 - (1 - f)^2:

One year, C$10,000, price unchanged, then sold:

For a one-year hold, a 1.5% conversion in each direction costs more than a year of expense ratio on any of the Canadian funds. With no conversion cost, the totals differ only by the fee and spread lines, and the US-listed fund's are the smaller. The Canadian funds' USD units (FBTC.U, BTCC.U, IBIT.U, EBIT.U) do not escape the step: a holder who starts with Canadian dollars needs a conversion to buy them as well, so a USD unit removes the conversion only for someone who already holds US dollars.

Because the conversion is paid once per round trip and the fee difference accrues each year, a break-even holding period follows. It is the number of years until the extra annual fee on the Canadian fund equals the one-off conversion cost on the US route: (round-trip conversion + US spread - Canadian spread) / (Canadian MER - 0.25%). For the IBIT row, spreads are left out on both sides, and the row assumes the published 0.33% MER is the all-in cost of the Canadian units, which the documents we read do not confirm. If the US trust's 0.25% were charged on top of the fund's 0.32% management fee, the 1.5% break-even would fall to about 9 years (2.9775 / 0.32).

Read these as arithmetic on the stated inputs. The 28.7 and 37.2 year rows mean only that the fee gap is small next to a 1.5% conversion, not that either figure is precise: the price is held flat and fees are applied simply. The break-even moves with every input. Fees change (Fidelity's fell from 0.39% to 0.32% in January 2025), spreads are averages over a past window, and a holder's own conversion fee may be lower or zero. The sums also leave out things that can matter more than 0.1% of fees: how a US-listed holding is taxed and reported in a given account, what happens to the exchange rate between purchase and sale (the section on units above showed how large that can be), and the tax result of selling one fund to buy another. If you are thinking about selling at a loss and buying a similar fund, our guide to the superficial loss rule for crypto in Canada covers how the CRA treats that, and the broader picture of why the same asset prices differently across venues is in why crypto prices differ across exchanges.

Registered accounts: what the issuers state

Registered-plan eligibility is stated in different places and in different strength. Here is what the documents say, each as of October 23, 2026 unless noted.

The Fidelity wording is the clearest statement of the test. A unit listed on a designated stock exchange is a qualified investment, and the Department of Finance's list, which we checked on October 23, 2026, includes Cboe Canada, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the TSX Venture Exchange. It is the listing and the fund's structure that qualify the unit, not the fact that it holds bitcoin; the CRA's folio wording and what happens if a holding fails the test are in our crypto TFSA and RRSP rules guide. The same Fidelity prospectus adds a note worth knowing: it records that the Department of Finance ran a consultation in 2024 on whether crypto-backed assets should be qualified investments, with submissions open until July 15, 2024, and says the manager will monitor developments. The prospectus does not say that any rule has changed; it only says the question was asked.

A unit being eligible says nothing about whether it fits an account, a plan or a person, and the ETF Facts we read state that the funds are high risk and that investors should be able to absorb a loss of some or all of their investment. Our Canada hub and ETFs and institutional hub collect the related pages, and the US-listed counterparts of these funds are set out in spot bitcoin ETFs compared. What a sale triggers when the units sit outside a registered account is covered in our Canadian crypto tax guide for 2026, which is the page to open if the account type is still undecided.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do Canadian bitcoin ETFs charge?

Management fees and MERs published by the issuers run as follows: iShares 0.32% and 0.33% (most recent report), Fidelity 0.32% and 0.35% (March 31, 2026), CI Galaxy 0.40% and 0.71% (June 30, 2026), Purpose 1.00% and 1.29% (June 30, 2026), Evolve 0.75% and 1.54% (December 31, 2025), and 3iQ's ETF 1.00% and 1.47% (June 30, 2025). On C$10,000 those MERs are between C$33 and C$154 a year. Fees change and the MER dates differ, so the current ETF Facts govern.

What is the difference between BTCC, BTCC.B and BTCC.U?

All three are units of the Purpose Bitcoin ETF. According to Purpose's prospectus and product page, BTCC is a Canadian-dollar unit that is currency hedged, BTCC.B is a Canadian-dollar unit that is not currency hedged, and BTCC.U is a US-dollar unit that is not hedged. Their management fees are the same, 1.00%, and the MERs reported at June 30, 2026 were 1.29% for BTCC and BTCC.B and 1.26% for BTCC.U.

Does the Canadian iShares Bitcoin ETF hold actual bitcoin?

It holds shares of the US-listed iShares Bitcoin Trust, which holds the bitcoin. BlackRock's September 2026 fact sheet shows 99.98% of the portfolio in that trust. The Ontario Securities Commission decision of November 12, 2024 says Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC is the custodian of the trust's bitcoin and that the Canadian fund's own custodian will be State Street Trust Company Canada.

Are CAD units safer than USD units?

Neither is safer in the sense of lower bitcoin risk, because both track the US dollar price of bitcoin. A CAD unit that is not hedged also carries the USD/CAD exchange rate, which over twelve-month windows since 2018 has moved between -14.50% and +11.99%. A hedged CAD unit aims to remove most of that, using forward currency contracts, but CI's prospectus says hedged series "do not offer the exact same return" as unhedged ones. A USD unit is priced in the currency the bitcoin price is quoted in, but a holder who starts with Canadian dollars still pays a conversion to buy it.

Can I hold a Canadian bitcoin ETF in a TFSA or RRSP?

Purpose, Evolve, 3iQ and BlackRock each state that their units are eligible for registered plans, and Fidelity's prospectus says its units qualify while they are listed on a designated stock exchange such as the TSX or Cboe Canada. We did not find an eligibility statement in the CI documents we read. A fund being eligible does not mean any particular holding is appropriate for an account, and the rules and penalties for non-qualified holdings are in the CRA folio, summarized in our TFSA and RRSP guide.

Why does QBTC trade below its net asset value?

The fund page does not explain it, and we make no claim about the cause. QBTC is a closed-end fund, and on October 21, 2026, its page showed a price of C$108.00 against a NAV per unit of C$115.562, about 6.54% below. Closed-end units trade at the market's price on the exchange rather than being created and redeemed daily in the way ETF units are. The fund's prospectus and annual information form describe its redemption terms.

Is the MER the same as the management fee?

No. The management fee is one component of the MER, which also covers operating expenses and sales tax, and it excludes trading costs, which ETF Facts report separately as the trading expense ratio. Purpose's product page lists a 1.00% management fee, and its September 25, 2026 ETF Facts shows a 1.29% MER at June 30, 2026, a 0.02% trading expense ratio and a total of 1.31%. Evolve's ETF Facts shows a 1.54% MER plus 0.01% in trading costs, totalling 1.55%.

Sources

CryptosEyes publishes general educational research, not investment, legal, or tax advice. This page compares published fund documents and does not recommend, rank or endorse any fund, issuer, broker or account type. Figures are drawn from issuer documents and public data sets on the dates shown and may have changed.