Bitcoin ETFs outside the US: Canada, Europe, Asia and beyond

The story most US investors have been told is that spot Bitcoin ETFs arrived in January 2024. That is only true of the United States. By the time the SEC approved eleven funds at once, Canada had been running spot bitcoin ETFs for nearly three years, Brazil for close to three, Australia for eighteen months, and Europe had a decade-old market in exchange-traded products that behave almost identically to funds without ever being one. This page maps that market. For the twelve US funds, see the US spot Bitcoin ETF list; this page deliberately does not repeat them.

Canada — first in the world, and still the most generous wrapper

Canada got there first because Canadian securities law never contained the obstacle that stopped Europe. Canadian ETFs are governed by National Instrument 81-102, which permitted a fund to hold spot bitcoin directly with a qualified custodian. There was no equivalent of the UCITS eligible-assets list to argue with, and no diversification rule that made a single-asset fund impossible. Regulators asked the ordinary questions about custody, valuation and disclosure, and the answers were satisfactory.

The result is a mature market of real ETFs, not notes. Investors hold units in a fund that owns the coins. The three main families are Purpose Investments, Evolve and Fidelity Canada.

Purpose runs four classes of the same bitcoin fund: BTCC is Canadian-dollar hedged, BTCC.B is Canadian-dollar unhedged, BTCC.U settles in US dollars and BTCC.J is a carbon-offset variant. The management fee is 1.00% and the management expense ratio 1.30%, with the .J and .U classes carrying 1.49% and 1.27%. Across all classes the fund held CAD 1.97bn on 1 September 2026. Fidelity's FBTC charges 0.32% — cut from 0.39% with effect from 13 January 2025 — for a 0.35% MER, and held CAD 1.611bn. Fidelity self-custodies through its own digital assets arm with at least 98% of coins in cold storage, and reported holding 14,974.18 BTC on 31 August 2026. Evolve's EBIT sits between them at 0.75% and CAD 209.30m.

Fee dispersion in Canada is more extreme than anywhere in the US market. Purpose charges more than three times what Fidelity charges for exposure to the same asset, held in comparable institutional custody, tracking the same price. Over a decade that difference is not a rounding error. The same arithmetic we run on the fee page applies here with more force.

On the ether side, Purpose's ETHH charges 1.00% on CAD 405.87m, Evolve's ETHR 0.75% on CAD 61.67m and Fidelity's FETH 0.40% on CAD 79.3m. The interesting difference is not fee but staking. Purpose stakes the fund's ether, with at least 80% of staking rewards accruing to the fund and the remainder to the manager. Evolve does not stake at all. That is a live yield difference on top of a fee difference, and it is the kind of detail that gets lost in a comparison table. We cover the mechanics on the ether ETF page.

3iQ Corp also runs a family — BTCQ, ETHQ, SOLQ and XRPQ, with US-dollar classes — and has dropped the CoinShares co-branding it once carried. We could not verify its fees or assets from issuer material, so we are not publishing numbers for it. CI Global Asset Management's CI Galaxy funds, BTCX and ETHX, could not be verified at all: the product pages did not resolve. Treat any figure you see quoted for either family as unconfirmed.

The single biggest structural advantage on this entire page is not a fee or a ticker. It is that Canadian spot crypto ETFs are eligible for a TFSA and an RRSP. A Canadian resident can hold spot bitcoin exposure inside a tax-free savings account, with growth and withdrawals untaxed, or inside a registered retirement plan with contributions deducted. No other jurisdiction on this page offers a clean equivalent, and — as the PFIC section explains — it is worth nothing whatsoever to an American.

Europe — why there is no European spot Bitcoin ETF

This is the most misunderstood fact in the whole category. People assume Europe simply has not got round to approving one. It has not got round to it because European fund law forbids it, and has forbidden it since long before bitcoin existed.

The retail fund wrapper in Europe is UCITS, established by Directive 2009/65/EC. Two separate provisions each block a spot bitcoin fund on their own, so removing one would change nothing.

The first is the eligible-assets list in Article 50(1), elaborated by the Eligible Assets Directive 2007/16/EC. A UCITS may hold transferable securities, money market instruments, bank deposits, units of other collective investment schemes, and derivatives on eligible underlyings. Bitcoin is none of those things, and a bitcoin derivative is not a derivative on an eligible underlying, so the indirect route closes too.

The second is the 5/10/40 diversification rule in Article 52. Exposure to a single issuer is capped at 5% of net asset value, stretchable to 10% provided all positions above 5% together stay under 40%. A fund that is 100% one asset cannot exist inside that rule at any size. This is not a crypto rule. It is exactly why there are no single-commodity UCITS ETFs either — gold is sold in Europe as an exchange-traded commodity for precisely the reason bitcoin is sold as an exchange-traded note.

There is one crack, and the entire European crypto ETP market fits through it. Article 50(2)(a) permits a UCITS to hold up to 10% of net assets in transferable securities that are not on the eligible list. A crypto ETN is a transferable security, so a UCITS fund may hold up to 10% in crypto ETPs even though it may never hold the coins. WisdomTree's own factsheet states the position with unusual clarity: "UCITS Eligible: Yes / UCITS Compliant: No." Anyone hoping European rules were about to change should read ESMA's final report on the review of the Eligible Assets Directive, dated 26 June 2025, which explicitly declined to make crypto directly investable and instead consolidated indirect ineligible exposure into a single 10% cap with look-through.

Two naming traps are worth memorising. BTCE, ISIN DE000A27Z304, was launched by ETC Group as "BTCetc" and is now issued by Bitwise Europe GmbH — the ticker did not change when the issuer did, so old and new sources describe the same security under different sponsor names. And WisdomTree's physical bitcoin product trades as BTCW on SIX, Euronext Amsterdam and the London Stock Exchange but as WBIT on Xetra. A surprising number of comparison tables list BTCW as the Xetra line. Note also that BTCW collides with the ticker of an unrelated US spot fund.

The cost spread across Europe is the widest anywhere. Bitwise's BTC1 charges 0.05% until 31 December 2026 and 0.14% thereafter; 21Shares' CBTC charges 0.10%; Invesco's BTIC charges 0.10%. At the other end, Bitwise's own BTCE charges 2.00% and 21Shares' ABTC charges 1.49%. Both of those are 2019–2020 vintage products carrying legacy pricing, and both are still large — which tells you how sticky an incumbent ETP can be. CoinShares' BITC is the largest bitcoin product in Europe at USD 1.648bn on 28 August 2026, and the issuer states a 0.15% fee even though several widely used aggregators still report 0.25%.

What an ETN actually is, honestly described

A European crypto ETP is a non-interest-bearing, open-ended, secured debt security issued by a bankruptcy-remote special-purpose vehicle. It lists and trades like a share and is created and redeemed by authorised participants — the same arbitrage machinery we describe in how Bitcoin ETFs work — which is why it behaves like an ETF on screen. But you are a creditor of an issuing SPV, not a unitholder in a fund.

The collateral arrangement is genuinely strong. These products are 100% physically collateralised: one security corresponds to a stated coin entitlement held in institutional cold storage with a segregated custodian and a security trustee standing behind it. The fee is not billed in cash — the coin entitlement per security declines a little every day, so the product tracks spot minus fee by construction. Over a year at 2.00%, you own 2% less bitcoin per note than you did.

The limited-recourse language is the part investors skim. WisdomTree's prospectus states that the securities are "direct, limited recourse obligations of the Issuer alone" and are not obligations of, or guaranteed by, the custodians, the bank or anyone else. That is the honest description of the risk. Three exposures follow from it that a spot ETF would not carry: issuer credit risk, because your claim is against an SPV; custodian risk, because coins may be lost, stolen or damaged and the issuer may be unable to meet its obligations if the custodian's insurance is insufficient; and AP concentration, because a thin roster of authorised participants is what keeps the price anchored to net asset value. Our risk guide works through the equivalent categories on the US side.

One further structural point that surprises people: these products are not alternative investment funds either. They are securities issuances under the Prospectus Regulation, with a base prospectus approved by a national competent authority and then passported across the EU. That is precisely how they escape both the UCITS product rules and AIFMD. The wrapper itself is lightly regulated; the venue, the prospectus and the distribution are not.

One asset, many wrappers

United Kingdom — the door the FCA opened and the tax code half-shut

Retail access to cryptoasset-backed exchange-traded notes in the UK opened on 8 October 2025. The change was made by the Conduct of Business (Cryptoasset Products) Instrument 2025, approved by the FCA Board on 31 July 2025 and published in Handbook Notice 132, arising from chapter 4 of consultation paper CP25/16. There is no separate policy statement number to cite, which trips up a lot of secondary reporting. The FCA's own announcement is here.

The conditions are strict. A cETN must be on the Official List and admitted to trading on a UK Recognised Investment Exchange. The products are classified as Restricted Mass Market Investments, which brings prescribed risk warnings, client categorisation, an appropriateness test before you can transact, a cooling-off period, and a ban on incentives to invest. The Consumer Duty applies to firms distributing them. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not cover investment losses on them. And the separate retail ban on crypto derivatives remains untouched.

Then the tax system partly closed the door the regulator had opened. From 6 April 2026, new purchases of crypto ETNs may only be held in an Innovative Finance ISA rather than a Stocks and Shares ISA, with holdings acquired before that date grandfathered where they sit. The practical problem is that these are two different product populations: in practice no UK platform currently offers both crypto ETNs and IFISAs, so the IFISA route is theoretical rather than usable. A UK investor who bought inside a Stocks and Shares ISA in the window between October 2025 and April 2026 is in a materially better position than one who waited.

Hong Kong — the only market where you can subscribe in coin

Hong Kong launched six spot virtual asset ETFs on 30 April 2024, from three managers, covering bitcoin and ether. They are SFC-authorised sub-funds of Hong Kong open-ended fund company umbrellas, physically backed, using no derivatives and no leverage, with a US dollar base currency and benchmarked to the CME CF APAC Variant reference rates struck at the 4pm Hong Kong fix.

The multi-counter structure confuses almost everyone. Each fund can have separate stock codes for its Hong Kong dollar, US dollar and renminbi counters. Only ChinaAMC has RMB counters: there is no 83439, no 83179, no 83008 and no 83009, whatever a secondary source may tell you. The codes below are checked against the HKEX official List of Securities.

Newer arrivals have changed the shape of the market. Pando Bitcoin listed on 18 July 2025 under a single Hong Kong dollar counter, 2818, and at roughly HK$271.39m is plausibly now the largest single spot crypto ETF in Hong Kong — while charging 2.00%, the most expensive headline fee in the market. Pando Ethereum followed under 3085. MicroBit listed bitcoin and ether funds on 20 August 2025 under 3430/9430 and 3425/9425. ChinaAMC added a Solana ETF on 27 October 2025 at 1.99%, with the full three-counter structure at 3460/9460/83460.

The Harvest fee story

Harvest Global launched as the cheapest of the original six at a 0.3% management fee. It then raised the management fee to 0.9% effective 24 February 2025, and removed its 1.00% ongoing-charges cap from 30 April 2025. Its disclosed ongoing charges figure for the twelve months to 31 March 2026 was 1.72%. The fund that launched as the cheapest of the six is now the most expensive on an all-in basis, and an investor who chose it on the original headline number has been paying nearly six times that rate. This is the clearest cautionary example on the page for anyone selecting a fund on a launch-day fee — the same lesson US investors learned when introductory waivers lapsed.

In-kind subscription, and who is excluded

The genuine Hong Kong differentiator is the in-kind, or in specie, mechanism. Both in-kind and in-cash creations and redemptions are permitted, but a participating dealer effecting an in-kind subscription must transfer the spot virtual asset through an SFC-licensed virtual asset trading platform or an authorised institution. The crypto never leaves the licensed perimeter. Bosera HashKey marketed this hardest, describing a coin-based subscription mechanism that lets investors use bitcoin and ether directly to subscribe for units, with the crypto leg running through HashKey Exchange. ChinaAMC and Harvest route the crypto leg through OSL Digital Securities. The US market only received equivalent in-kind permission in 2025, which we cover in the regulation guide.

Hong Kong also got to staking first in the region. The Bosera HashKey Ether ETF was approved on 11 April 2025 to stake up to 30% of its ether, effective 25 April 2025 — the first spot virtual asset ETF in the region authorised to earn proof-of-stake rewards, subject to prior SFC approval, provider due diligence and disclosure of the staked proportion of net asset value.

One persistent myth deserves killing. Mainland Chinese investors are categorically excluded from these funds, and not as a matter of regulatory discretion. HKEX's rules for including ETFs in Southbound Stock Connect require an eligible fund's benchmark index to have at least 60% of its weighting in SEHK-listed stocks. A fund benchmarked to a bitcoin reference rate has zero. The exclusion is a standing index-composition test that a crypto ETF can never pass, and most of these funds also fall short of the separate HK$550m average assets threshold.

Australia — two feeder families and three direct holders

Australia's market is small, competitive and structurally more varied than its size suggests. Eight crypto ETFs trade across two venues, and the split between funds that hold coins and funds that hold other funds is the thing to understand before you compare fees.

VBTC is Australia's largest at A$289.90m on 1 September 2026 and the first crypto ETF to list on the ASX, on 18 June 2024. Its own product disclosure statement is explicit that it is a feeder fund into the US-listed HODL rather than a direct holder. From 1 August 2026 its fee was restructured into 0.25% management plus 0.20% indirect costs — the presentation changed, the 0.45% all-in did not.

EBTC and EETH from Global X 21Shares were Australia's first spot bitcoin and ether ETFs, listed on 9 May 2022 on what was then Cboe Australia and is now TMX Australia. They hold interests in a sub-fund rather than coins on the balance sheet, with Coinbase Custody as crypto custodian. At 0.45% they hold A$152.4m and A$43.0m respectively.

IBTC from Monochrome is the interesting one. It is verified as Australia's first ETF to hold bitcoin directly, and the first authorised under the crypto-asset licensing category that ASIC introduced on 29 October 2021. It listed on Cboe Australia on 4 June 2024, cut its fee from 0.50% to 0.25% on 18 March 2025 to become the cheapest crypto ETF in the country, and held A$144.6m on 8 May 2026. It offers dual-access applications, in cash or in-kind. IETH is its much smaller ether sibling on the same terms.

BTXX from DigitalX is ASX-listed, not Cboe — a detail several comparison sites get wrong. It charges 0.49%, held A$33.3m on 31 July 2026, and holds bitcoin directly with at least 80% in segregated cold storage at Coinbase Custody. QBTC and QETH from Betashares listed on the ASX on 18 February 2025 at 0.45% as feeders into Bitwise's US funds. So the market now has two feeder families — VanEck into HODL, Betashares into Bitwise — alongside three direct holders.

One product regularly miscounted: Betashares' CRYP is a crypto equities fund and states plainly that it will not invest in crypto assets directly. It belongs with the mining and crypto equity funds, not here.

On the venue question, be careful with the numbers that circulate. ASX clearing treatment was widely reported as punitive enough to push the early issuers to Cboe, and the directional claim is well supported: Cboe hosted Australia's first spot crypto ETPs from May 2022 while the ASX hosted none until VBTC in June 2024, and Monochrome publicly announced on 5 April 2024 that it was moving its bitcoin ETF application from the ASX to Cboe Australia. The specific capital charge percentage that gets quoted alongside that story is not something we have been able to verify, so we do not repeat it.

Brazil and other markets

Brazil listed Latin America's first crypto ETF about two months after Canada and nearly three years before the United States. Hashdex's HASH11 reached B3 on 22 April 2021 and held BRL 2.637bn on 1 September 2026. These are CVM-regulated index funds — fundos de índice — and most of them are feeders into offshore master funds rather than direct holders. The family spans more assets than the US market did for years, which is worth comparing against the current crypto ETF list.

BITH11 is the bitcoin-specific fund at 0.70% and BRL 1.387bn. ETHE11 and SOLH11 cover ether and Solana. XRPH11 needs two caveats: B3 trading began on 25 April 2025, but the issuer page shows a 2021 fund-constitution date, and the published assets figure is stale as of 9 January 2026. We publish it with the date attached rather than pretending it is current.

Everywhere else, briefly

South Korea has no domestic crypto ETF. The Financial Services Commission formalised plans on 14 July 2026 to amend the Capital Markets Act in the second half of 2026 so that digital assets count as eligible ETF underlyings, and it is building a composite price index across the five major domestic exchanges to give a unified won reference price. The nine-year ban on corporate crypto investment was lifted in January 2026. The domestic ban is still technically in force, but on an explicit legislative path to removal.

Japan moved further on paper and not at all in practice. The Cabinet approved an amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act on 10 April 2026 and the Diet gave final approval on 15 July 2026, reclassifying bitcoin, ether, XRP and around 104 other assets as financial instruments and cutting the maximum capital gains rate from 55% to a flat 20% — a rate not active until 2028. Despite all of that, no spot bitcoin ETF has been filed, approved or listed in Japan.

India has no domestic crypto ETF. Residents may legally buy US-listed spot ETFs through the Reserve Bank of India's Liberalised Remittance Scheme, up to USD 250,000 a year, though IFSCA restricted GIFT City access to crypto ETF products for Indian residents in September 2025.

Israel is a semantic trap. The Israel Securities Authority approved six bitcoin-tracking mutual funds, not ETFs, all mandated to begin trading on the same day, 31 December 2024. Several reportedly track a US ETF rather than holding spot.

Switzerland is the deepest crypto product market on earth by a wide margin. SIX's own Crypto Products Report for February 2026 counts 381 listed crypto products, of which 212 are crypto ETPs, across 23 underlyings. The notable recent development is who is issuing them: iShares, Xtrackers, Fidelity, Invesco and VanEck all now have issuer entities present. SIX publishes turnover and trade counts but no aggregate assets figure.

Sweden hosts the originals. CoinShares' XBT Provider certificates from 2015 — COINXBT, COINXBE, COINETH and COINETHE — still trade on Nasdaq Stockholm, all at 2.50%, a fee that reflects their vintage. Note the structural distinction: these are certificates, not the collateralised debt securities of the modern physical range, and CoinShares itself draws the line explicitly. One correction while we are here: the widely reported "CoinShares delisting" was the delisting of CoinShares International Limited's own ordinary shares in March 2026 after a merger and a venue move to the US. The trackers were not delisted.

Thailand is institutional-only so far. The Thai SEC approved One Asset Management's ONE-BTCETFOF-UI, restricted to wealthy and institutional investors, and has consulted on draft rules for retail-accessible spot bitcoin and ether ETFs with a comment period running to 20 September 2026.

The UAE has none. We found no crypto ETF or ETP listing on Nasdaq Dubai, the Dubai Financial Market or the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. Given how often Gulf listings are announced as imminent, it is worth saying that plainly rather than speculating about what may be coming.

The PFIC problem

Can a US investor buy these? The PFIC section

Two separate obstacles stand between a US person and everything on this page, and they operate independently. Clear one and the other still stops you.

The first is access. Essentially none of these products is available through a normal US brokerage, and the block is US securities registration, not disclosure quality. European ETPs, Canadian ETFs, Hong Kong ETFs and Brazilian index funds are not registered under the Securities Act, so a US broker generally will not offer them to a US retail client. Canada is the operational near-miss — a shared time zone, English-language documents, familiar settlement — and it is also the worst idea of the lot on tax.

The second obstacle is the one that actually decides the question. A foreign corporation is a passive foreign investment company under IRC §1297 if at least 75% of its gross income is passive, or at least 50% of its assets produce or are held to produce passive income. A foreign-domiciled fund holding bitcoin fails both tests comprehensively. Canadian ETFs, Irish, Jersey and German ETP issuers, Hong Kong ETFs and Brazilian fundos de índice are all PFICs for a US person.

The point people most often get backwards: a US-domiciled ETF holding foreign assets is not a PFIC. Domicile is what matters, not what the fund owns. A US spot Bitcoin ETF holding coins in custody in Ireland would still be a domestic fund for this purpose.

There are two escape hatches in the statute and neither is reliably available here. The qualified electing fund election requires the fund to supply a PFIC Annual Information Statement, which most non-US crypto issuers simply do not produce — they have no commercial reason to serve a shareholder base they are not marketing to. The mark-to-market election requires the stock to be "marketable", which is a fact-dependent test that thinly traded ETPs may not satisfy, and it converts your position into annual ordinary-income recognition on unrealised appreciation, which is not obviously a prize.

And Canada's headline advantage evaporates on contact with a US passport. A TFSA or an RRSP is a Canadian tax-shelter; it does nothing for a US person's US tax liability, and a US person who is also a Canadian resident faces additional reporting on top.

The conclusion is unusually clean for a tax question. A US person's rational route is a US-listed spot ETF or direct coin ownership. Not a foreign-domiciled ETP, however attractive its fee looks on a screen. A 0.05% European note that costs you the long-term capital gains rate is not cheaper than a 0.15% US fund; it is far more expensive. Compare the US list, read our view on the funds worth owning, or weigh the trade-off on holding the fund versus the coin.

This is educational material, not tax advice. PFIC rules are among the most complex in the Internal Revenue Code and the consequences of getting them wrong are expensive. Our Bitcoin ETF tax guide covers the US treatment in more depth, and anyone holding or considering a foreign fund should take advice from a qualified cross-border tax professional.