Search “bitcoin ETF Canada” and you get six TSX-listed funds, five issuers, at least four custodians and a fee column that runs from 0.29% to 1.00% a year. Canada listed the world’s first spot bitcoin ETF in February 2021, and the numbers you remember from then are probably stale.
Here is what is on the shelf as of September 4, 2026, every figure read from the issuer’s own fund page on that date, what the CRA says about holding these funds in a TFSA or RRSP, and where the ETF route and holding your own keys part ways.
What a spot bitcoin ETF in Canada actually is
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a pooled fund whose units trade on a stock exchange like a share. A spot bitcoin ETF holds actual bitcoin rather than futures or mining stocks, so a unit is a claim on a slice of the coins in the fund’s vault. In Canada these are public investment funds under National Instrument 81-102, the rulebook that also governs mutual funds, and they trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) through any brokerage account.
Two cost terms appear in every fund document. The management fee is what the issuer charges to run the fund, as a percentage of assets per year. The MER, or management expense ratio, is the all-in annual cost: management fee plus operating expenses and taxes. It is deducted inside the fund, so it never arrives as an invoice; it shows up as returns that trail bitcoin by that margin. Purpose, for one, caps the MER of its flagship fund at 1.50% and passes on savings when costs run lower.
A custodian is the regulated firm that holds the fund’s bitcoin, which means it controls the private keys. Most Canadian funds also name a sub-custodian, a specialist that runs the vault. Cold storage means keys kept on devices that never touch the internet.
None of this was on the TSX before 2021. The door opened in October 2019, when an Ontario Securities Commission panel overruled its own staff and ordered a prospectus receipt for 3iQ’s The Bitcoin Fund, a closed-end fund. CryptoCanucks covered that ruling at the time. The ETFs followed sixteen months later.
The Canadian spot bitcoin ETFs, compared
The table holds only what each issuer publishes on its own fund page or in its own releases. Fees were read on September 4, 2026; the MER dates are the issuers’ as-of dates, which differ because the funds report on different fiscal calendars. Where a fund page does not name the custodian, the cell says so.
| Fund | Tickers (TSX) | Management fee / MER as published | Hedged or unhedged | Custodian |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose Bitcoin ETF | BTCC (CAD, FX hedged), BTCC.B (CAD, unhedged), BTCC.U (USD, unhedged) | 1.00% / MER 1.30% for BTCC and BTCC.B, 1.27% for BTCC.U (as of June 30, 2026) | Both | Cidel Trust Company; sub-custodians Coinbase, Gemini and Anchorage Digital Bank |
| Purpose Core Bitcoin ETF | BTCO.B (CAD, unhedged), BTCO.U (USD) | 0.29% / MER 0.39% (as of June 30, 2026) | Unhedged only | Same Purpose custody stack as BTCC |
| CI Galaxy Bitcoin ETF | BTCX.B (CAD, unhedged), BTCX.U (USD) | 0.40% / MER 0.68% (as at December 31, 2025) | Unhedged ETF units; CI’s fund page also lists a C$ hedged series | Not named on the fund page; CI’s launch release describes “a segregated cold storage system” |
| Fidelity Advantage Bitcoin ETF | FBTC (CAD, unhedged), FBTC.U (USD, unhedged) | 0.32% / MER 0.35% (as of March 31, 2026) | Unhedged only; Fidelity says no currency-neutral version exists | Fidelity Clearing Canada ULC; sub-custodian Fidelity Digital Asset Services |
| 3iQ Bitcoin ETF | BTCQ (CAD), BTCQ.U (USD) | 1.00% / MER 1.47% (as of June 30, 2025) | Unhedged | Tetra Trust Company; sub-custodian Coinbase Custody Trust Company |
| Evolve Bitcoin ETF | EBIT (CAD, unhedged), EBIT.U (USD) | 0.75% plus sales taxes / MER not shown on the fund page | Unhedged | Gemini Trust Company named as sub-custodian in Evolve’s February 2021 launch release; the fund page does not name one |
Notes on reading it. Purpose also lists a carbon-offset unit, BTCC.J, with a 1.49% MER, and launched BTCO in May 2025 as a lower-fee sibling inside the same custody arrangement. 3iQ’s page spells out that BTCQ is eligible for RRSP, RRIF, RDSP, DPSP, RESP and TFSA accounts. And the MER is not the whole cost: the gap between a unit’s market price and its net asset value, the bid-ask spread and broker commissions all sit outside it.
Hedged or unhedged. Bitcoin is priced in US dollars on most markets, so a Canadian buyer takes two bets at once: bitcoin against the dollar, and the dollar against the loonie. A hedged unit uses currency forward contracts to strip out the second bet, so it tracks bitcoin in US-dollar terms even though you paid in Canadian dollars. An unhedged unit lets the exchange rate ride along with the coin. Only Purpose lists a hedged ETF unit for its flagship, BTCC, labelled “FX Hedged” beside the “Non-FX Hedged” BTCC.B at the same fee. Fidelity’s FAQ is blunt: “at the moment the ETF and the ETF Fund are not available in a currency neutral version.” Coins in a hardware wallet are unhedged by definition.
Who holds the coins
Every fund in the table keeps its bitcoin with a custodian that must qualify under the same rules as a custodian of stocks and bonds. CSA Staff Notice 81-336, the regulators’ 2023 guidance for public crypto funds, states: “Their portfolio assets (including crypto assets) must be held by custodians or sub-custodians that qualify under sections 6.2 and 6.3 of NI 81-102 as applicable.” The same notice reports that staff reviewed several funds’ custody in November 2022 and confirmed segregation of the fund’s coins from the custodian’s own, “the use of offline or ‘cold wallet’ storage”, the fund listed as beneficial owner in the custodian’s books, verification on the blockchain, and insurance over the custodied assets. Canada’s public crypto fund rules are summarised on our law tracker.
The custody map has shifted since launch. In 2021 the first ETFs leaned on Gemini Trust Company in New York; Purpose’s February 12, 2021 release names Gemini as sub-custodian, and so does Evolve’s. By September 2022, 3iQ had moved its ETPs to Coinbase and Calgary’s Tetra Trust. Fidelity built its own stack: Fidelity Clearing Canada as custodian, Fidelity Digital Asset Services storing the coins, at least 98% in cold wallets. On July 21, 2026, Purpose added Anchorage Digital Bank as a third sub-custodian beside Coinbase and Gemini, under Cidel Trust Company.
Diversifying custody risk this way is how institutional-grade digital asset investing should work. Vlad Tasevski, Chief Innovation Officer, Purpose Investments, in the company's July 21, 2026 release
For a bitcoiner the point is not which logo is on the vault. An ETF unit is a chain of promises: issuer to you, custodian to issuer, sub-custodian to custodian, and your broker holding the units in between. Each link is regulated and, per the CSA, insured and audited. Each link is also a counterparty you did not choose. Two of the Canadian custodians in that chain, Tetra and Balance, are in our company directory.
TFSA, RRSP and what the CRA allows
This is the question that fills r/BitcoinCA every February, and the CRA answers it directly. Income Tax Folio S3-F10-C1 states that, “except for certain derivatives, any security that is listed on a designated stock exchange” is a qualified investment for an RRSP, RESP, RRIF, RDSP, FHSA or TFSA. The TSX is a designated exchange, which is why every issuer above can call its fund registered-account eligible and why Purpose’s page says the fund “is eligible for registered accounts such as TFSAs and RRSPs.”
The same folio closes the other door: “Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, are not considered to be money issued by a government of a country and are not qualified investments.” A registered plan holding a non-qualified investment owes a tax “equal to 50% of the fair market value of the property”. No Canadian brokerage will take coins into a TFSA anyway, so the rule mostly explains why the ETF exists: it is the only way to put bitcoin exposure inside a tax-sheltered account.
Outside a registered account the two routes are taxed on the same principle with very different paperwork. Coins are property; the CRA says a disposition happens when you “trade or exchange it for government-issued currency or another type of crypto-asset” or spend it, and on account of capital “you must include half of your capital gains” in income. ETF units are securities, so a sale is reported like any other ETF sale. The difference is who keeps the ledger.
ETF or self-custody: fees, records and counterparties
Self-custody means you hold the private keys yourself, usually on a hardware wallet, with no company between you and the coins. Side by side, the trade-offs are concrete.
- Ongoing cost. An ETF charges its MER every year, compounding quietly; over a decade 1.30% is a meaningful slice of the position and 0.35% a much smaller one. Self-custody costs a hardware wallet once, network fees on the transactions you send, and the exchange spread when you buy. Our markets page shows spot prices in CAD.
- Custody. The ETF’s keys sit with a qualified custodian in insured cold storage under CSA supervision, and you never touch them. With self-custody, security is exactly as good as your seed-phrase discipline, and there is no insurer or regulator to call if you lose it.
- Tax records. For self-custodied coins the CRA expects, per transaction, “the date and time of each transaction”, the number of units, “the value of the crypto-asset (in Canadian dollars) at the time of each transaction” and “the addresses associated with each digital wallet used”, plus exchange ledgers, kept for “at least six years”. An ETF collapses that to a unit purchase and a unit sale.
- Counterparty risk. An ETF adds the issuer, the custodian, the sub-custodian and your broker. Self-custody removes all of them. Canadians have watched a custodial intermediary fail before: the lessons of QuadrigaCX remain the clearest domestic case, and the CSA notice itself cites “the bankruptcies of crypto asset exchange platform FTX, the crypto asset lender Genesis” as background to its custody expectations. A public fund’s custodian is a very different animal from an unregulated exchange, but it is still someone else holding the keys.
- What you can do with it. ETF units cannot be sent over the Bitcoin network, moved to Lightning, used as collateral outside the brokerage or spent. Coins can. If that matters to you, no fee schedule changes the answer. Our guide to borrowing against bitcoin in Canada covers who lends against coins, and the price at which they sell them.
Some readers run both: the ETF inside a registered account for the shelter, coins in cold storage for everything else. That is a description of what people do, not a suggestion. New to holding keys? Start with our bitcoin basics guide.
What changed since February 2021
The world’s first spot bitcoin ETF started trading on the TSX on February 18, 2021, when Purpose listed BTCC.B and BTCC.U with a 1.00% management fee and Som Seif called the OSC “a crucial working partner”. The rest of the field arrived fast, then kept moving.
- February 19, 2021. Evolve’s EBIT begins trading, the day after Purpose.
- March 9, 2021. CI Galaxy’s BTCX lists with a 0.40% management fee, which CI billed as the lowest of any bitcoin ETF in the world. The fee war started in week three.
- March 31, 2021. 3iQ’s BTCQ inception date.
- November 30, 2021. Fidelity’s FBTC launches with in-house custody.
- September 21, 2022. 3iQ moves custody to Coinbase and Tetra Trust, bringing a Canadian custodian into an ETF chain.
- May 31, 2023. Ninepoint’s Bitcoin ETF, after a unitholder vote, becomes an equity fund investing in Web3 companies. One spot fund leaves the list.
- July 6, 2023. The CSA publishes Staff Notice 81-336, the first consolidated guidance on how public crypto funds must custody, value and disclose.
- January 10, 2024. The US Securities and Exchange Commission approves spot bitcoin ETPs, almost three years after Canada, with staff reviewing ten registration statements at once. Its chair added that the SEC “did not approve or endorse bitcoin.”
- May 14, 2025. Purpose launches BTCO at a 0.29% management fee, the smallest number on any Canadian spot bitcoin ETF page today.
- July 21, 2026. Purpose adds Anchorage Digital Bank as a third sub-custodian.
Read as a whole: fees fell, custody spread across more hands including Canadian ones, and the regulator wrote down rules that in 2021 were still being worked out fund by fund with the OSC. The US arriving in 2024 changed the global conversation but not the Canadian shelf. These funds were here first.
Data, not advice
Everything above is what the issuers, the CRA and the CSA publish, read on September 4, 2026, with a link to each page so you can check it when the numbers move, and they will. This is data, not advice. Nothing here recommends a fund, a custodian or a way of holding bitcoin; it sets out the fees, the custody chains and the tax rules so a Canadian can weigh the ETF route against a hardware wallet with the actual numbers in hand. When a fee changes, an issuer switches custodian or the CRA updates its folio, the table gets updated and a note goes at the top.
