Why PlainIndex doesn't score crypto ETPs

First, what this page is not

This page takes no position on whether crypto belongs in a portfolio. That's an allocation question, and PlainIndex doesn't make allocation calls — not for crypto, not for gold, not for small-cap value. The site scores how well a fund implements an exposure; whether you want the exposure is yours to decide. The question this page answers is narrower: given that spot-crypto ETPs exist and people ask about them, why aren't they in the catalog?

What a spot-crypto ETP is, structurally

IBIT, FBTC, GBTC, and ETHA are grantor trusts, not 1940-Act investment companies. Each trust holds exactly one asset — bitcoin or ether in custodial cold storage — and issues shares against it. There is no portfolio manager, no index of securities, no rebalancing, and no income: the underlying asset pays no dividends or interest, so the trusts make no distributions. The sponsor fee accrues by selling small amounts of the underlying over time, which is why the asset-per-share figure declines slowly even when the price doesn't move.

Structurally these are siblings of the physical gold trusts (GLD, IAU) rather than of index funds — single non-productive asset, grantor-trust wrapper, fee paid in kind. The gold trusts make it into the catalog because gold has a long-standing slot in published lazy-portfolio allocations (Permanent Portfolio, Golden Butterfly) that the site documents. Crypto ETPs don't have that anchor, and as the next section shows, the scoring framework has even less to say about them.

Why the scoring axes collapse

The PlainIndex composite weighs four sub-scores: cost, tax efficiency, liquidity, and concentration. It was built for diversified index funds, and a single-asset trust breaks three of the four:

• Concentration is definitionally 100%. The sub-score measures top-10 holdings as a share of net assets to surface diversification differences within a category. A trust holding one asset has no diversification to measure — every fund would pin to the floor, telling you nothing.
• Tax efficiency has no distribution profile to score. The trusts distribute nothing, so the distribution-rate component is vacuously perfect, and the asset-class base in our table doesn't have a researched entry for grantor-trust crypto (the IRS treats the trusts as pass-throughs; gains are property gains, and the in-kind fee accrual creates small reportable sales each year that brokers handle inconsistently). Scoring this with a made-up base would be exactly the kind of false precision the methodology page exists to prevent.
• Holdings analysis — the layer that powers the overlap tool, the similar-funds links, and the compare pages — has nothing to work with. There is no N-PORT filing and no holdings table; "overlap" between two bitcoin trusts is 100% by construction.
• Cost and liquidity survive — but with only those two axes live, the composite stops being a multi-dimensional score and degenerates into a fee comparison with an AUM tiebreaker. We can publish that comparison honestly as a table (below) without dressing it up as a 0–100 score it isn't.

The one fact the methodology can speak to: fees

Because every spot-bitcoin trust holds the same asset, the funds are near-perfect substitutes for one another, and the sponsor fee is the main structural differentiator. The spread is unusually wide:

AUM figures are rounded and move with the underlying asset's price — treat them as order-of-magnitude indicators as of June 2026, not live data. Fees are the prospectus sponsor fee.

The notable row is GBTC: at 1.50%, it charges six times the fee of IBIT and FBTC for the identical underlying asset — a legacy of its pre-2024 closed-end-fund structure, where conversion costs and embedded capital gains have kept long-time holders in place despite the spread. Holders weighing that fee against their own embedded gains are making a tax decision specific to their situation, which is outside what this site models.

Will this change?

Only if the methodology grows sub-scores that meaningfully differentiate single-asset trusts — custody arrangements, creation/ redemption mechanics, premium/discount behavior — and we don't currently have a data source that covers those transparently enough to score. Until then, the honest answer is the one above: for spot-crypto ETPs, the fee table is the analysis, and it fits on one screen. The methodology page documents everything the composite does measure, and the guides cover the diversified categories the framework was built for.