Bitwise’s board voted on June 30 to liquidate six single-stock crypto option-income ETFs: ICOI (Coinbase), IMRA (Marathon Digital), IMST (Strategy), IGME (GameStop), ICRC (Circle), and IETH (Ethereum). Trading halted August 3. Final NAV got calculated August 7. Cash lands in shareholder accounts on or about tomorrow, August 10.

Six funds, gone in about six weeks from announcement to wire transfer. That part isn’t unusual — we’ve watched this exact mechanical process play out with Hashdex’s Bitcoin ETF and a wave of YieldMax and REX closures back in June. What makes this batch worth a dedicated post is the gap between what these funds advertised and what they delivered. Annualized distribution rates ran as high as 22.36%. Since-inception total returns ran as low as -66.11%. If you only read the yield number, you missed the fund losing more than half its value underneath it.

That gap has a name. It’s not new to this site. But single-stock crypto option-income ETFs are a distinct — and nastier — flavor of the same trap we’ve documented in YieldMax’s suite, and it deserves its own accounting.

Quick Verdict: What Just Happened

Fact	Detail
Funds closing	ICOI, IMRA, IMST, IGME, ICRC, IETH
Underlying assets	Coinbase, Marathon Digital, Strategy (MicroStrategy), GameStop, Circle, Ethereum
Board vote	June 30, 2026
Trading halted	August 3, 2026
Final NAV calculated	August 7, 2026
Cash distribution	On or about August 10, 2026
Advertised annualized distribution rates	7.44% – 22.36%
Since-inception total returns	-12.47% (IGME) to -66.11% (IMST), IETH close behind at -58.34%
Combined AUM pre-liquidation	~$23.1 million across all six funds

Bottom line: These funds didn’t fail because crypto had a bad year. They failed because the “income” was mostly your own money coming back to you while the underlying positions bled out, and once that became visible in the return data, nobody had a reason to keep holding.

What Bitwise Actually Announced

The mechanics here match the closure playbook we’ve now covered for Hashdex, REX, and YieldMax almost exactly. After the close on July 31, the six funds stopped accepting creation and redemption orders. Trading halted before market open on August 3. Bitwise calculated final NAV on August 7 — a date the company had to correct once already, pushing it back two days from an initial August 9 target. Shareholders who hadn’t sold by July 31 get cash automatically, no action required, no option to roll into a replacement fund.

If you held any of these six and are wondering whether you need to do something before tomorrow: you don’t. The redemption is automatic. The only decision that mattered already passed — whether to sell on the open market before the halt or ride it to NAV. That window closed August 3.

The Yield-vs-Reality Gap

Here’s where this batch of closures earns its own post instead of folding into the general shakeout coverage.

Bitwise’s option-income ETFs write covered calls against a single reference asset — Coinbase stock for ICOI, Ethereum itself for IETH, and so on — and pay out the collected premium monthly. As of late June, the six funds were advertising annualized distribution rates between 7.44% and 22.36%. Reasonable-sounding numbers for a crypto-adjacent income product, especially with the “up to 25%” framing that circulated in some of the trade press coverage.

Then look at what actually happened to the money since each fund launched. IGME, tracking GameStop, held up best of the six — still down 12.47% on a since-inception total return basis. IMST, tracking Strategy (Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy-turned-Bitcoin-treasury company), was the worst of the group at -66.11%. IETH wasn’t far behind at -58.34%.

Worth pausing on IMST specifically, because it’s an easy ticker to confuse with something else on this site. YieldMax’s MSTY is a different fund from a different issuer tracking the same underlying stock (MicroStrategy/Strategy), and we’ve already documented MSTY’s brutal return-of-capital math elsewhere. Bitwise’s IMST is not MSTY. They’re competitors running the same basic strategy against the same reference stock, and both ended up in roughly the same place — a fund that paid out a headline yield while quietly handing investors back their own capital as the NAV collapsed underneath them.

That’s the pattern across all six Bitwise funds, even the ones where we don’t have an individually reported since-inception figure. A double-digit advertised yield sitting on top of a double-digit-to-triple-digit percentage loss isn’t two separate facts. It’s one fact told twice.

What Is Return of Capital, and Why Does It Matter Here?

Return of capital (ROC) is a distribution paid from an investor’s own principal rather than from income the fund actually generated. Instead of profit from options premium or dividends, the fund hands back a slice of the money you put in and labels it a “distribution.” The yield percentage can look identical to real income on a brokerage statement, but ROC reduces your cost basis and often coincides with a declining NAV — meaning the “income” is really a partial, tax-complicated refund of your own investment.

Apply that definition to the numbers above and the Bitwise closures stop looking like six unrelated bad-luck outcomes. A fund advertising a 22% yield while sitting on a 66% inception-to-date loss isn’t generating 22% worth of anything. It’s distributing cash that has to come from somewhere, and when the options premium alone can’t cover it, the somewhere is your principal.

Why Single-Stock Crypto Option-Income ETFs Are the Riskier Cousin

Covered-call ETFs on diversified baskets — think JEPI against the S&P 500 — already cap your upside in exchange for premium income. That’s a real tradeoff, but it’s a manageable one, because no single company’s collapse takes the whole fund down with it.

Single-stock crypto option-income ETFs stack two separate volatility problems on top of each other. First, the covered-call structure itself: you cap the upside on rallies and absorb the full downside on drops, same as any single-stock covered-call fund. Second, and specific to this batch, the reference assets are Coinbase, Marathon Digital, Strategy, GameStop, Circle, and Ethereum itself — a set of tickers that already rank among the most volatile tradable assets in public markets. GME has a documented history of 50%+ swings inside a single quarter. MARA’s business is Bitcoin mining, which means its stock price is a leveraged bet on a leveraged bet. Writing calls against that kind of underlying doesn’t tame the volatility. It just converts some of it into a yield number that looks stable right up until the NAV chart tells the real story.

Diversified crypto exposure — even something as blunt as a spot Bitcoin ETF — spreads that risk differently. A single-stock option-income wrapper on top of an already-volatile crypto proxy concentrates it. That’s the structural reason this subcategory produces closures with uglier numbers than the broader income-ETF shakeout we’ve tracked since June.

The $23.1 Million Problem

Combined, the six funds held about $23.1 million in assets heading into liquidation. Divided six ways, that’s under $4 million per fund on average — nowhere near enough for even a sub-1% expense ratio to cover fund administration, custody, options execution, and compliance costs.

That’s the same arithmetic behind the 13-ETF closure wave from REX, YieldMax, and Defiance in June: assets under management fall below the level needed to run the fund profitably, and the math stops working regardless of how the strategy performed on paper. The difference here is that the underperformance wasn’t subtle. When a fund’s own returns look like IMST’s or IETH’s, investors don’t need a prospectus footnote to notice something’s wrong. They redeem, AUM shrinks further, and the closure becomes close to inevitable.

What Should You Do If You Held ICOI, IMRA, IMST, IGME, ICRC, or IETH?

1. Do nothing to receive your cash. If you held shares through the July 31 cutoff, redemption is automatic and proceeds arrive on or about August 10.
2. Check your cost basis before assuming this was a wash. ROC distributions you received along the way already lowered your basis. The taxable gain or loss on the final liquidation may not match your gut sense of “I lost money here.”
3. Don’t reinvest the proceeds into a similar single-stock crypto option-income product without checking its since-inception return first. The advertised yield told you nothing useful about these six funds. It won’t tell you anything useful about their replacements either.
4. If the income need is real, compare against instruments where the yield comes from something auditable — bond coupons, BDC loan interest, dividends from profitable companies — rather than premium collected against an asset that can lose 60% of its value in a year.

How to Screen the Next One of These

Same framework we laid out for the broader income-ETF shakeout, with one addition specific to crypto-linked single-stock funds: pull up the since-inception total return before you look at the advertised yield, not after. If the fund is more than a year old and total return is negative by more than the S&P 500’s worst year in the last decade, the “yield” is return of capital doing the talking. Combine that with AUM under $50 million and a reference asset that itself carries triple-digit annualized volatility — Coinbase, MARA, GME, a single crypto token — and you’re looking at a fund with most of the closure risk factors already checked.

None of that means every crypto option-income ETF is a future liquidation notice. It means the yield number by itself tells you almost nothing, and the honest accounting always starts with total return, not the distribution rate.

The Bottom Line

Six funds. Six weeks from board vote to cash in your account. And a yield range of 7.44% to 22.36% sitting on top of losses that ran as deep as 66%. That’s not a market downturn story. It’s a structural one — these funds needed enough real options income to cover their advertised distributions, didn’t generate it, made up the difference with investor principal, and the NAV told that story the entire time for anyone who bothered to check.

If you’re holding anything that pairs a double-digit yield with a single volatile crypto-adjacent stock underneath it, this is the week to pull the since-inception return and actually read it. The Bitwise six aren’t an isolated incident. They’re the same trap this site has been documenting since spring, wearing a crypto ticker instead of a tech one.

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Liquidation details from Bitwise’s official announcement via PR Newswire. Distribution rate and since-inception return figures per CryptoSlate reporting on Bitwise fund data, August 2026 and CryptoNews.net, August 2026. This is not financial advice. Verify current fund status and your own cost basis before making tax or investment decisions.