Bitwise Will Close Its Dogecoin ETF Less Than a Year After Launch

Bitwise will wind up its Dogecoin ETF. The firm said on Thursday it had decided to liquidate the fund, which trades on NYSE Arca under the ticker BWOW, and that shareholders need take no action while that happens. The last trading day is 14 October. Net asset value is struck on 21 October and cash reaches holders the day after. The fund listed in November 2025, so it closes less than a year after it opened.

The stated reason is a product line, not a price

One sentence in the release carries the whole explanation.

"Bitwise has determined to liquidate the Fund as it continues to optimize its product range to meet evolving investor needs," the company said.

Nothing in it mentions dogecoin's price, which The Block put near $0.084 on Thursday against a market value of about $13 billion for the token. The prospectus language quoted in the same release is blunter about the asset than the closure notice is: dogecoin is a memecoin that does not aim to provide utility, with an unlimited supply that may weigh on its value over time. Bitwise keeps its bitcoin funds and its other established crypto products. CryptoBriefing reported that the firm also closed several option-income ETFs in July, a detail that appears in that outlet alone.

Two figures for the same day in June

How small the fund became depends on who is counting. Cryptopolitan put net assets at $721,815 as of 8 September, held in about 8.2 million DOGE. CryptoBriefing said only that assets had fallen below $1 million. For the middle of the year the two print figures that are close and not identical: CryptoBriefing gives holdings of 6.56 million DOGE worth about $473,699, and Cryptopolitan gives net assets of $473,547 at 30 June. The gap is $152. Neither outlet shows its source, and we could not establish which figure supersedes the other.

Both agree on the direction. Cryptopolitan traces the fall from $1.15 million at the end of the first quarter. Returns come quoted over two different windows and should not be read against each other. CryptoBriefing puts the first half of 2026 at minus 38.37%, with net asset value per share going from $19.21 at the end of 2025 to $11.84 by mid-year. Cryptopolitan gives minus 45.37% since inception.

Two readings of the same volume figure

A figure of roughly $300 million appears in two write-ups, and the outlets do not mean the same thing by it. The Block attributes it to BWOW's own accumulated trading volume since launch. Cryptopolitan attributes it to US dogecoin ETFs as a group. Those claims cannot both hold, and neither outlet acknowledges the other. On either reading the peer comparison is unflattering. Hyperliquid ETFs did $2.1 billion of volume and Chainlink funds $680 million, with Zcash products between them at $1.5 billion. Launch week was BWOW's busiest, at about $3 million of volume in a day, and August brought $318,000 of net inflows, which The Block prints and nobody else does.

What the closure settles

Approval was never the constraint here. Dogecoin ETFs exist, several of them, and the first of any issuer debuted in September 2025. CryptoBriefing lists Grayscale's GDOG, 21Shares' TDOG and REX-Osprey's DOJE as still trading; none of the three has announced anything similar, and that roster comes from a single outlet. Bitwise's own shelf cuts both ways, since its Solana fund passed $1 billion under the same listing rules that produced BWOW.

Thursday's release leaves two things open. It does not say whether creation orders stopping at the market open on 15 October leaves holders a ready exit in the days that follow, and it does not say what becomes of the fund's dogecoin between the final NAV date and the distribution a day later. Nobody has said whether another issuer is next.