Bitwise Pulls the Plug on Its Dogecoin ETF After Less Than a Year

Bitwise is winding down its Dogecoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) after less than eleven months of trading, marking a retreat from one of the crypto industry’s most experimental financial products. The fund trades under the ticker BWOW on the NYSE Arca exchange, and Bitwise announced on Thursday that its final trading day will be October 14, 2026.

The remaining assets will be liquidated shortly thereafter. Shareholders who still hold shares on October 22, 2026, will receive a cash distribution equivalent to the net asset value of their shares as of October 21, 2026. Bitwise noted that shareholders do not need to take any direct action to receive their cash payouts.

BWOW held just $722,000 in net assets as of September 8, 2026. Its underlying holdings consisted of approximately 8.2 million DOGE, valued at roughly $688,000, leaving the fund without the capital required to sustain its operational costs.

The product officially debuted on November 26, 2025, after Bitwise cleared the final regulatory hurdles earlier that month. The company removed a delaying amendment from its registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), allowing the filing to become effective automatically after 20 days without requiring explicit, active approval from the agency.

At launch, Bitwise Chief Executive Officer Hunter Horsley described the ETF as a bridge for a passionate community of retail investors. Horsley stated that the firm was launching the product because millions of Dogecoin holders wanted the structural benefits and security of getting exposure to cryptocurrency through an exchange-traded product (ETP) format.

Bitwise had first pursued the product by registering a Dogecoin ETF entity in Delaware in January 2025. That move came during a period of massive regulatory expansion in the digital asset sector, following the landmark approvals of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 and spot Ethereum ETFs later that July. Asset managers then rushed to submit filings for other tokens, including Solana, XRP, and Dogecoin, hoping to capture retail interest within traditional brokerage accounts.

Established spot Bitcoin ETFs, including Bitwise’s own BITB, command billions of dollars in assets under management. Mainstream institutional investors have embraced Bitcoin as a digital alternative to gold, while Dogecoin’s highly volatile, community-driven nature has proved more difficult to market to traditional brokerage clients.

Dogecoin was originally created in 2013 as a lighthearted joke by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. Retail traders interested in meme coins generally prefer to trade the underlying tokens directly on native cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance, avoiding the management fees associated with wrapped ETF structures.

Other major digital asset managers also tested similar products. Grayscale Investments introduced its own XRP and Dogecoin products around the same time as Bitwise’s late 2025 launch. Bitwise did not explicitly cite the low asset under management figure as the primary reason for closing the Dogecoin fund, instead characterizing the liquidation as a strategic maneuver to “optimize its product range to meet evolving investor needs.” The closure signals a broader trend among digital asset managers to refine their product lineups, focusing resources on high-demand, institutional-grade assets rather than speculative retail tokens.