FBTC: the one Bitcoin ETF that keeps the coins in the family

What FBTC is

The Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund is a trust that owns bitcoin and nothing else. Shares trade on Cboe BZX under the ticker FBTC, and each one represents a proportional claim on the coins held in cold storage. The trust charges a single unified fee of 0.25% a year, taken by selling a sliver of the bitcoin continuously, so the coin count behind each share declines very slightly over time even when the fund is neither buying nor selling on your behalf.

Like the rest of the category, it is a grantor trust registered under the Securities Act of 1933 rather than a fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. That is not a technicality. It changes which protections apply to you as a shareholder, and it is worth reading the explanation in what a Bitcoin ETF actually is before you buy anything in this category, FBTC included.

By size FBTC is the clear number two. It held 175,483 BTC on 31 August 2026, worth roughly $13.6bn at the reference price used on this site, which is about 13.6% of category assets. That leaves it a long way behind BlackRock's fund and a long way ahead of everything else — the full ranking sits on the US spot Bitcoin ETF list.

The custody question

Here is the thing that makes FBTC genuinely different. Fidelity Digital Assets NA holds the bitcoin, and Fidelity Digital Assets is an affiliate of FD Funds Management LLC, the fund's sponsor. Every other US spot Bitcoin ETF hires an unrelated custodian. Coinbase Custody holds roughly 80% of all bitcoin sitting inside US ETFs, which means that in a category built on the idea of removing single points of failure, one company ended up as the single point of failure for four dollars in five.

FBTC is the only large fund that removes that exposure entirely. Not diversifies it — removes it. ARK 21Shares' ARKB spreads coins across three custodians, which is a different and also respectable answer, but Fidelity is the only sponsor that simply does the job itself. If you have looked at the numbers on the issuers and custodians page and concluded that concentration is the risk you care most about, FBTC is where the argument lands.

Now the other side, because it is a real argument and it does not get made often enough. Independent custody exists for a reason. When the sponsor and the custodian are separate companies, the custodian has its own regulator, its own auditors, its own balance sheet and its own incentive not to be complicit in anything the sponsor might want. Collapse the two into one corporate family and you lose that separation. You are trusting Fidelity to check Fidelity. Some institutional investors have policies that specifically forbid exactly this arrangement, and they are not being irrational.

So the honest summary is that FBTC does not eliminate custody risk. It converts a concentration risk shared across the whole industry into a related-party risk concentrated inside one firm. Which of those two you prefer depends on whether you think the greater danger is a single third-party custodian failing, or a sponsor marking its own homework. There is no universally correct answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Fee and the promotion that ended

FBTC charges 0.25% a year as a unified fee, which means the sponsor absorbs the ordinary operating costs out of that number rather than passing them through separately. There is no waiver in force. Fidelity launched with a 0% promotional rate and that promotion ended on 31 July 2024, so the full charge has applied for well over two years.

That is worth dwelling on, because the introductory-rate pattern has caught out a lot of people in this category. Investors chose funds in early 2024 on headline numbers that were never permanent, and the fine print did what fine print does. VanEck's HODL is the sharpest version of the same story — its waiver expired on schedule with the fund well short of the asset threshold that would have extended it. If you bought a spot Bitcoin ETF during a free period, check what you are actually paying now rather than what you remember agreeing to.

At 0.25%, FBTC costs the same as IBIT and considerably more than the cheapest options. On $25,000 you are paying about $63 a year; the 0.15% charged by Grayscale's Mini Trust would be about $38 for identical exposure to the same asset. Over a decade of compounding, ten basis points on a growing position is not a rounding error. The arithmetic, including spread and tracking cost, is worked through on the Bitcoin ETF fees page.

Costs

Size, spread and creation

FBTC trades well. Its median bid-ask spread was 0.03% on 31 August 2026, matching IBIT, and average volume ran around 5 million shares over ten days and 4 million over ninety. Reported tracking difference sits near 0.03%, which is about as tight as this category gets. For any normal retail order size, the execution experience in FBTC is effectively indistinguishable from the largest fund on the list.

The creation side is more interesting than it looks. Ten authorised participants were named as of 1 April 2026: ABN AMRO Clearing USA, BMO, Citadel Securities, Goldman Sachs & Co., Jane Street, Jefferies, JP Morgan Securities, Macquarie, Morgan Stanley & Co. and Virtu Americas. Morgan Stanley is the name to notice, because it appears on FBTC's list and not on IBIT's thirteen. Authorised participant rosters are a quiet signal about which desks are willing to carry inventory in a product, and an extra bulge-bracket name is a mild positive.

FBTC is covered by the SEC's in-kind order of 29 July 2025, Release 34-103571, under Cboe BZX Rule 14.11(e)(4). Whether it actually uses in-kind creation and redemption day to day is not confirmed in anything we have been able to verify — in-kind activity is documented at scale only for IBIT. We would rather say that plainly than imply an operational capability from a regulatory permission. If tighter arbitrage matters to your decision, treat FBTC's in-kind status as permitted but unproven.

The Fidelity default

A large share of American retirement and brokerage money already lives at Fidelity. For those households, buying FBTC is a two-minute job inside an account that already exists, with no new provider, no transfer and no additional paperwork. That convenience is real and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

But a default is not the same thing as an optimum. FBTC being easy to buy where you already are is a fact about your brokerage relationship, not a fact about the fund. Every US spot Bitcoin ETF on the directory is available in a Fidelity account, including the ones charging ten basis points less. The path of least resistance and the best available answer occasionally coincide; they are not the same claim, and the vertical integration that makes FBTC frictionless for Fidelity customers is precisely the reason it is worth spending five minutes checking whether you would have chosen it on merit.

Where we think FBTC genuinely wins on merit: you want a large, liquid, well-run fund, and you specifically do not want your exposure routed through Coinbase Custody along with most of the rest of the industry. That is a coherent, defensible position, and FBTC is the best expression of it available. Where it loses: you are a cost-focused long-term holder with no strong custody view, in which case the fee gap is the only thing that will still matter in ten years. Our picks by investor type take that split seriously, and if you are still deciding between the fund and the asset itself, the ETF versus coin comparison is the right starting point. Practical mechanics live in how to buy a Bitcoin ETF.