Chainlink ETF Explained: Grayscale GLNK vs Bitwise CLNK, Fees and Flows
Two US spot Chainlink ETFs: Grayscale GLNK (2 Dec 2025, 0.35%) and Bitwise CLNK (14 Jan 2026, 0.34%). Neither stakes. $154.0m of inflows and $171m of assets by 16 Sep 2026.
TL;DR. Two spot Chainlink ETFs trade in the US, both on NYSE Arca and both custodied at Coinbase: Grayscale's GLNK, listed on 2 December 2025 at a 0.35% fee after four years as a private trust, and Bitwise's CLNK, listed on 14 January 2026 at 0.34%. Neither stakes its LINK, even though Chainlink has run a staking program since November 2023. Between them they had taken in $154.0m of net inflows and held about $171m of assets by 16 September 2026, per the issuers' own daily files, and the money kept arriving while LINK fell from $13.47 to $10.89. Grayscale's fund holds roughly three-quarters of the total.
What a spot Chainlink ETF actually is
A spot Chainlink ETF is a US-listed trust that buys LINK tokens, hands them to a custodian, and issues shares against the pile. One share is a fixed and slowly shrinking slice of the trust's LINK: 0.886 LINK per GLNK share and about 1.82 LINK per CLNK share as of 16 September 2026. The share trades on NYSE Arca like any stock, settles T+1, and sits in an ordinary brokerage or retirement account.
Authorized participants create new shares when demand pushes the price above the value of the underlying LINK, and redeem them when it falls below. Those creations and redemptions are the daily figures on our Chainlink ETF flows page. Trading between two investors changes nothing inside the trust and never shows up in flows.
The two US tickers
| GLNK | CLNK | |
|---|---|---|
| Issuer | Grayscale Investments Sponsors | Bitwise Investment Advisers |
| Exchange | NYSE Arca | NYSE Arca |
| First trading day as an ETF | 2 December 2025 | 14 January 2026 |
| Sponsor fee | 0.35% | 0.34% |
| Launch waiver | Until 2 Mar 2026 or NAV above $1bn | 0% on the first $500m, 14 Jan to 13 Apr 2026 |
| Custodian | Coinbase Custody Trust Company | Coinbase Custody Trust Company |
| NAV benchmark | CoinDesk Chainlink Benchmark Rate | CME CF Chainlink-Dollar Reference Rate, NY variant |
| Staking | No, prohibited by the trust documents | Not yet; sponsor states an intention to stake later |
| Creations | In-kind and cash | In-kind and cash |
| Assets, 16 Sep 2026 | $127.8m, 13.20m shares | $43.5m, 2.20m shares |
| LINK held, 16 Sep 2026 | ~11.70m | 4.00m |
| Structure | Grantor trust, not a 1940 Act fund | Grantor trust, not a 1940 Act fund |
GLNK is the older product by a wide margin. The trust was formed on 18 December 2020, sold as a private placement in 2021, quoted on OTC Markets from 2022, and uplisted to NYSE Arca with about $17m of assets on 2 December 2025. Bitwise organized its trust on 13 August 2025 and had it trading five months later. The fee gap is one basis point and the custodian is the same firm, so the practical differences come down to size, spread and staking: GLNK has the liquidity, CLNK has the lower fee and a published on-chain wallet you can audit yourself.
What Chainlink and LINK are, in one section
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network. Smart contracts can't read anything outside their own blockchain, so a lending protocol that needs the price of ETH has to get it from somewhere; Chainlink's node operators fetch it, agree on it, and post it on-chain. Its Data Feeds are the most widely used price source in DeFi lending, and its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), generally available since 24 April 2024, moves messages and tokens between chains, including for Swift member banks routing tokenized-asset instructions.
LINK is the token that pays for all of it. It has a fixed total supply of one billion; Grayscale's 10-K put the trust's 6.0m LINK at roughly 0.9% of the circulating supply at the end of 2025, which implies a float of about 670 million. Users pay node operators in LINK, and since November 2023 holders can stake it as collateral behind the feeds. An ETF holder owns a claim on a fixed-supply token whose demand follows network traffic, not a currency thesis.
Why an oracle token got a spot ETF at all
Before September 2025, every US spot crypto ETF needed its exchange to file a Rule 19b-4 petition for that one product. Bitcoin took over a decade, Ethereum most of a year, and LINK would have been a multi-year fight with no obvious end.
On 17 September 2025 the SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares on NYSE Arca, Nasdaq and Cboe. An asset qualifies if, among other routes, it underlies a futures contract on a CFTC-regulated exchange that has traded for at least six months. Coinbase Derivatives, a registered designated contract market, had listed LINK futures in July 2024. LINK cleared the bar on day one.
Grayscale, with the trust, custodian and accounting already in place, uplisted within eleven weeks of the rule change; Bitwise built a new trust from scratch and listed six weeks after that. We covered the same mechanism in the Hyperliquid ETF explainer; the SEC approval history shows how different the old road was, and the full roster of 2026 launches is in our list of new crypto ETFs.
Staking: what these funds don't do
This is the part most coverage skips. Chainlink Staking v0.2 went live on 28 November 2023 with a 45,000,000 LINK pool: 40,875,000 for community stakers and 4,125,000 for node operators. The base reward rate is 4.5% a year, or an effective 4.32% for community stakers after a 4% delegation cut, with a 28-day unbonding cooldown and a 15,000 LINK cap per community address. The community pool was full at the time of writing.
Neither ETF touches it. Grayscale's 10-K for 2025 states that "none of the Trust, the Sponsor, the Custodian, nor any other person associated with the Trust may, directly or indirectly, engage in Staking." Bitwise's 10-Q for the quarter to 31 March 2026 says the trust "does not engage in staking" but that "it is the current intention of the Trust to conduct staking" at a future date. If it does, the per-address cap and the 28-day unbonding period are the constraints to watch, because four million LINK doesn't fit into a 15,000 LINK slot.
So a LINK ETF holder pays 0.34% or 0.35% a year and forgoes a reward a self-custodied holder could earn. That's a different trade from the Hyperliquid funds, where staking rewards partly offset the fee. The consequence is visible in Grayscale's own file: GLNK held 0.88776770 LINK per share on listing day and 0.88608558 on 16 September 2026. That 0.19% decline is the sponsor fee, paid in coin, and it equals 0.35% a year charged for six and a half months, which is what you'd expect if the fee was fully waived until 2 March 2026 and charged in full after.
How the flows are measured
No aggregator publishes daily LINK ETF flows, so cryptoetf.today computes them from the issuers' own disclosures, one business day at a time, with the standard formula for a spot crypto trust:
flow(T) = (shares outstanding on T+1 − shares outstanding on T) × NAV per share on T
For GLNK the inputs come from Grayscale's daily performance spreadsheet, which lists shares outstanding, NAV and AUM for every trading day since 2021. For CLNK they come from the fund's website, which publishes net assets, shares and NAV each day plus the Ethereum address holding the LINK. That wallet held 4,000,665 LINK on 17 September 2026, matching the reported holdings to the fourth decimal.
Three details follow from the method:
- Flows lag a day. A basket created on Tuesday appears in Wednesday's share count, so Tuesday's flow shows once Wednesday's file is out. Nothing here is real time.
- Weekends are empty. Shares are only created and redeemed on trading days. LINK trades on Saturday; the funds don't.
- The sponsor fee never shows as an outflow. It's deducted in LINK, not in shares, which is why GLNK's LINK per share drifts down while its flow history shows almost no redemptions.
GLNK's 3.5m listing-day shares are valued at the prior day's NAV of $10.59, or $37.1m, so cumulative totals match the industry convention. Otherwise the mechanics are the same as in our guide to reading Bitcoin ETF flows; only the inputs are smaller.
What the flows have shown so far
Through 16 September 2026 the two funds had recorded $154.0m of cumulative net inflows across 198 trading sessions:
| Month | Net flow | LINK price, last session of month |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2025 (from 2 Dec) | +$59.2m | $12.21 |
| Jan 2026 | +$15.3m | $10.79 |
| Feb 2026 | +$13.2m | $8.71 |
| Mar 2026 | +$10.8m | $8.78 |
| Apr 2026 | +$13.2m | $9.11 |
| May 2026 | +$8.2m | $9.02 |
| Jun 2026 | +$3.6m | $7.20 (series low) |
| Jul 2026 | +$4.7m | $8.17 |
| Aug 2026 | +$20.1m | $11.10 |
| Sep 2026 (to 16 Sep) | +$5.8m | $10.89 |
Of those 198 sessions, 90 show a net inflow, 106 show nothing, and only two show a net redemption, together worth less than $1m. GLNK's share count rose on 60 days and fell on three. A Bitcoin ETF flow chart has routine redemption days. This one looks like a product whose buyers are allocating and where almost nobody trades in and out.
The price context makes it stranger. LINK was $13.47 on listing day and $10.89 on 16 September, a 19% decline, and it spent late June near $7.20. The inflows didn't stop. The biggest day after the listing was 21 August 2026 at $5.2m, during a run from $8.67 to $11.99 in seven sessions, the one stretch where flows clearly chased price. GLNK went from 1.47m shares on listing day to 13.20m by 16 September: nine times the share count with the price down a fifth.
What LINK ETF flows can and can't tell you
They're small relative to the market. Two funds holding about 15.7m LINK own a little over 2% of the circulating supply. A $4m day is a good day for these funds and a rounding error against spot LINK turnover, so a strong inflow week is evidence of allocator interest, not a force that moves the price.
They can't show selling that never went through the trust. A holder who sells GLNK to another investor leaves no trace in the flow data. An outflow prints only when the price sags below NAV far enough for an AP to redeem, which on a fund with steady bids can take a long time. It's one reason the redemption count is so low.
They do tell you whether the wrapper is being adopted. Ninety inflow days in nine months, through a drawdown of more than half from the listing-week high of $14.64, is a real fact about a real set of buyers, at one two-hundredth of the Bitcoin scale.
Costs, spreads and what to check before buying
The sponsor fee is the number everyone quotes and the least important one on a fund this size.
Bid-ask spread. CLNK's own disclosures show a 30-day median bid-ask spread of 0.57% as of 16 September 2026, more than a year and a half of the sponsor fee, paid in and again out. Use limit orders. GLNK, at nearly three times the assets, is the more liquid of the two.
Premium and discount. On 16 September GLNK closed at $9.66 against a $9.68 NAV, while CLNK closed at $19.89 against $19.77, a 0.6% premium. Small funds drift further from NAV than large ones, and a premium you pay today is a cost that appears in no fee table. The mechanics are in our premium and discount explainer.
The staking you're not getting. A self-custodied holder with a slot in the community pool earns around 4.3% a year; an ETF holder earns nothing and pays 0.34% to 0.35%. For someone willing to run a wallet, that gap is the real cost of the wrapper. For a retirement account, which can't hold LINK directly, the fund is the only route in.
Chainlink ETPs outside the US
Europe had physically backed LINK products years before the SEC did.
| Product | Listed | Fee | Assets (Sep 2026) | Where |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21Shares Chainlink ETP (CH1100083471) | Xetra since 31 Jan 2022 | 2.50% | ~EUR 22m | SIX, Xetra, Euronext Amsterdam and Paris, Borsa Italiana |
| VanEck Chainlink ETN (DE000A3GXNV0) | 26 Apr 2022 | 1.50% | ~EUR 6m | Xetra, gettex |
Both are Swiss or Liechtenstein debt instruments backed one-for-one by LINK, and both charge four to seven times what GLNK and CLNK do. Neither is tracked on this site.
FAQ
Is there a Chainlink ETF?
Yes, two in the US, both spot funds holding LINK directly on NYSE Arca: the Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF (GLNK), which began trading as an ETF on 2 December 2025, and the Bitwise Chainlink ETF (CLNK), which listed on 14 January 2026.
What is the Chainlink ETF ticker?
GLNK for the Grayscale fund and CLNK for the Bitwise fund, both on NYSE Arca. In Europe the 21Shares product trades as LINK on SIX, ALINK on Euronext and 21XL on Xetra, and the VanEck note trades as VLNK on Xetra.
Which Chainlink ETF has the lowest fee?
Bitwise CLNK at 0.34%, one basis point below Grayscale GLNK at 0.35%. Bitwise charged 0% on the first $500m from 14 January to 13 April 2026; Grayscale waived its fee until 2 March 2026 or $1bn in net assets. On funds this size the bid-ask spread matters more than the basis point.
Do Chainlink ETFs stake their LINK?
No. Grayscale’s trust documents prohibit staking outright. Bitwise’s 10-Q says the trust does not currently stake but intends to at a future date. Chainlink Staking v0.2 pays around 4.3% to community stakers, so ETF holders give that up in exchange for custody and account access.
How much money is in Chainlink ETFs?
About $171m as of 16 September 2026: $127.8m in GLNK across 13.2m shares and $43.5m in CLNK across 2.2m shares, per the issuers’ daily disclosures. Cumulative net inflows since GLNK listed came to $154.0m over the same period.
Why is a Chainlink ETF possible when the SEC blocked altcoin ETFs for years?
Because on 17 September 2025 the SEC approved generic listing standards that let exchanges list a spot crypto trust without a product-by-product rule change, provided the asset meets tests such as six months of CFTC-regulated futures trading. LINK futures had traded on Coinbase Derivatives since July 2024, so it qualified immediately.
Sources and further reading
- Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF, Form 10-K for 2025 (custodian, staking prohibition, listing date, LINK per share) — sec.gov.
- Bitwise Chainlink ETF, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 March 2026 (fee, waiver, staking intention, custodian, benchmark) — sec.gov.
- Bitwise, CLNK daily fund data — clnketf.com; Grayscale, GLNK page and daily file — etfs.grayscale.com.
- Chainlink, Staking v0.2 overview (pool size, reward rate, unbonding) — chain.link; Coinbase Derivatives, CFTC-regulated LINK futures — coinbase.com.
- Daily data: Chainlink ETF flows tracker. Internal: every new crypto ETF of 2026, how to read ETF flows.
