Bitcoin ETFs Are Negative for 2026 and the Tallies Do Not Agree
Spot bitcoin ETFs are in the red for 2026. CoinDesk, filing at 05:45 UTC on Friday, put the year's net outflows from the US-listed funds at $1.56 billion, on SoSoValue data it says it analyzed itself. The headline on that same page says over $1.5 billion. The summary box above the first paragraph says more than $1 billion, and puts this week's exits at over $500 million where the body says $643.6 million. One page, one week of redemptions, four renderings of it.
How fast the year turned
On 29 October the funds were up about $1.01 billion for 2026, by CoinDesk's count. A single session took most of that back: $643.3 million left on 30 October, leaving the group ahead by $368 million. The weekly tallies finished the job. CoinDesk counted $643.6 million of outflows this week through Thursday, $1.28 billion the week before and $202.6 million the week before that. The last day these funds took money in at all was in October.
Four numbers, four measurements
No two of the published year-to-date figures cover the same thing. The Block's count for the week ending 6 November, which it called the sharpest weekly loss since June, left 2026 net flows down $914.1 million at that point. BeInCrypto, relayed by COINTURK on Friday morning, had bitcoin and ether funds together at negative $2.25 billion as of 11 November. The same relay put $1.48 billion of outflows across all US spot crypto ETFs between 4 and 10 November, of which $1.06 billion came out of bitcoin products, $326 million out of ether and $89.4 million across Solana, XRP, Hyperliquid and Zcash funds.
Different baskets, different closing dates. They do not reconcile into a single number, and none of the outlets says which count supersedes which. What all of them carry is the direction: the funds have given back the year's gains, and they did it in about a fortnight.
Twelve weeks above half a billion
CoinDesk counts twelve weeks in 2026 with net outflows above $500 million. There were fifteen such weeks in all of 2025 and four in 2024, and both of those years still ended well in the black, at net $21.37 billion and $35.24 billion. Four more of them in the six weeks left would make 2026 a record for redemptions on CoinDesk's arithmetic, which is its projection and not a figure anyone has measured yet.
One attempt at scale came through two hands. COINTURK, relaying Decrypt, reported HashKey senior researcher Tim Sun putting the five-day withdrawal at roughly 2.6% of the $55.1 billion these products have taken in since launch, with an average cost basis near $81,000. Neither figure appears in the CoinDesk or Block accounts read for this piece, and we could not check it against the Decrypt original. It stands unverified.
Six weeks to go
What settles this is arithmetic that has not happened yet. Six reporting weeks remain in 2026, and the record CoinDesk sketches needs four of them to clear $500 million of exits. The year's headline number will also depend on which basket the counting uses, since bitcoin-only and bitcoin-plus-ether totals are already more than a billion dollars apart. Bitcoin traded below $70,000 on Friday for the first time since August, which is the backdrop the flows are being read against.
Read also: Bitcoin Loses $70,000 as Two Liquidation Counts Fail to Agree