Fund profiles
FBTC — the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund
FBTC is the only major US spot Bitcoin ETF that custodies its own coins. What that structure changes, what it costs, and how it compares to IBIT at the identical fee.
Every fund in this category is nearly identical, with one genuine structural exception. Nine of the twelve US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products rely on Coinbase Custody in some capacity. FBTC does not use it at all — Fidelity holds the bitcoin itself, through a regulated trust company inside its own corporate group.
That is the only meaningful architectural divergence in the whole category, and it is why FBTC earns a page rather than a line in a table.
The key facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | FBTC |
| Full name | Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund |
| Sponsor | Fidelity Investments |
| Listing exchange | Cboe BZX |
| Launched | 11 January 2024 |
| Sponsor fee | 0.25% per year |
| Net assets | Approximately $13.2 billion |
| Custodian | Fidelity Digital Asset Services — in-house |
| Structure | Grantor trust, Securities Act of 1933 |
| Category position | Third largest US spot Bitcoin ETP |
| Ether sibling | FETH, the Fidelity Ethereum Fund, also self-custodied |
Net assets move daily with the bitcoin price and with flows. Confirm current figures on Fidelity's own fund page.
The self-custody structure
FBTC's bitcoin is held by Fidelity Digital Asset Services, a New York-chartered limited liability trust company. It is a regulated qualified custodian in its own right, and it sits inside the same corporate family as the fund's sponsor.
Fidelity did not build this for the ETF. Fidelity Digital Assets has served institutional clients for years, which is why the firm was in a position to self-custody from day one while every other major issuer was signing custody agreements with third parties.
The operational reality is the same as anywhere else at this scale: keys generated and stored on hardware that has never been networked, geographically separated key shares, multiple authorised signers, transactions constructed offline. What differs is who is accountable for it — and to whom.
The trade-off, stated in both directions
| Dimension | FBTC — self-custody | Most peers — third party |
|---|---|---|
| Counterparties involved | Fewer — no external custodian | One more entity in the chain |
| Category concentration exposure | None — does not use the dominant custodian | Nine of twelve funds share one provider |
| Independence of the custody check | Weaker — sponsor and custodian share a parent | Stronger — genuinely separate entities |
| Regulatory standing of the custodian | New York-chartered trust company | Chartered trust companies and a federal digital asset bank |
| Failure mode to worry about | A problem at one corporate group affects both roles | A problem at the custodian affects most of the category |
| Who is accountable | One firm, end to end | Two firms, with a contract between them |
There is no correct answer here. It depends on whether you are more concerned about correlated failure across the category or about the absence of an independent third party.
We think this is genuinely a matter of which risk you would rather hold, and the marketing on both sides tends to present it as settled. It is not. Broader treatment in custody explained.
The fee versus the market
FBTC charges 0.25% — identical to IBIT, and mid-range for the category. Morgan Stanley's MSBT arrived in April 2026 at 0.14%, and Grayscale's Bitcoin Mini Trust charges 0.15%.
On a flat $10,000 position over ten years, 0.25% costs roughly $265 in fees against about $149 at 0.14%. So choosing FBTC over the cheapest available fund costs roughly $116 per $10,000 per decade, and what you are buying with it is the custody structure rather than liquidity or options.
Whether that is worth paying is a judgment about how much you value the custody arrangement. Unlike IBIT's premium, which buys measurable execution quality, FBTC's is buying a structural preference. That is a legitimate thing to pay for; it is just harder to quantify. See fees and expense ratios.
Liquidity
FBTC is the third-largest fund in the category and, alongside IBIT, one of the two that institutional money has consolidated into — Bloomberg Intelligence found 83% of new spot Bitcoin ETF inflows in the first quarter of 2026 went to one or the other.
That means liquidity is genuinely good, and still short of IBIT's. IBIT's 30-day median bid-ask spread has run around 0.02%, the tightest in the category, and it has the only substantial listed options market among spot Bitcoin funds. FBTC has no comparable options depth.
Flow data reflects the ordinary competition between them rather than any structural weakness — on 27 August 2026, for instance, Farside recorded IBIT at +$277.6 million and FBTC at −$83.6 million on a day with $242.3 million of net category inflow. Single days mean little; see flows explained.
The most direct answer to custody risk
Self-custody by a fund is still custody by someone else. Holding the keys yourself is the only arrangement with no third party at all — buy on a licensed exchange and withdraw. CEX.IO is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, licensed for money transmission across US states, and authorised in Gibraltar as a DLT provider.
FETH, the ether sibling
Fidelity applies the same structure on the ether side. FETH, the Fidelity Ethereum Fund, charges 0.25% and is likewise self-custodied by Fidelity Digital Asset Services.
One difference is worth flagging. FETH has been a price-only fund, meaning it did not capture the staking rewards direct ether holders earn — the same restriction that applied to ETHA and Grayscale's converted trust. Fidelity filed an amendment to add staking, with remaining reviews expected to clear during 2026. If staking distributions matter to you, confirm FETH's current status on the fact sheet rather than assuming, because the position has been moving. See Ethereum staking ETFs and the Ethereum ETF list.
The structure, and what it means at tax time
FBTC is a grantor trust registered under the Securities Act of 1933, not a fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Every US spot Bitcoin ETP shares that structure, and it has two consequences worth knowing before you buy.
First, shareholders are treated as owning a pro-rata interest in the trust's bitcoin, taxed as property. The trust does not issue a Schedule K-1; your broker reports share sales on Form 1099-B in the ordinary way.
Second, and less obviously, the sponsor fee is paid by the trust selling bitcoin. Because you are treated as owning a slice of the underlying, those sales are technically small disposals of your pro-rata share — reportable events on a position you never traded. Over a year, on a 0.25% fee, that is a modest amount of paperwork rather than a large tax bill, and inside an IRA it stops mattering entirely. Full treatment in Bitcoin ETF taxes, and the wrapper comparison in what is a crypto ETF.
Who should own FBTC
Good fit: investors who specifically want to avoid the category's custodian concentration, who value a single accountable firm end to end, or who already hold everything at Fidelity and want the position on the same statement.
Weaker fit: cost-focused buy-and-hold investors, for whom 0.14% or 0.15% delivers the same bitcoin for less. Active traders and options users, for whom IBIT's depth is worth the identical fee. And anyone whose main concern is related-party risk, where a genuinely independent third-party custodian is the more logical choice.
Our take from the desk
FBTC is the fund we find most interesting and the one whose pitch is hardest to price. Everyone agrees custodian concentration is a real issue in this category, and FBTC is the only large fund that actually does something about it — by introducing a related party instead. That is a real answer to a real problem, and it is not a free one. If we were holding a large bitcoin position across wrappers, we would want some of it here precisely because it does not share the failure mode of everything else.