Dogecoin’s attempt to join the institutional ETF lineup faces a fundamental problem: Institutions may not want it. In a Jan. 22 conversation on the Crypto Prime podcast, Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst James Seyffart and host Nate Geraci, who is also president of NovaDius Wealth Management, said spot Dogecoin ETFs have attracted “near zero” demand so far, a result they tie to who typically buys DOGE and how financial advisors think about reputation risk in client portfolios.
The Dogecoin data point has landed in a broader discussion about a crowded crypto ETF pipeline. Seyffart said its current count of crypto ETF deposits has climbed “definitely above 150,” with many products spanning spot and derivatives, income overlays, buffers and multi-asset structures. This increase, he argued, gives the impression that issuers will “throw spaghetti at the wall” in 2026.
Dogecoin ETF Reality Check
But deposit volume does not guarantee demand, and Dogecoin is the clearest example of this gap so far. Asked which existing products stood out, Seyffart said “nothing really stands out,” before singling out Dogecoin as the exception, precisely because it failed to resonate.
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“The real honest answer is that nothing really stands out to me…honestly, if I have to pick one thing that stands out, it’s probably that there has been almost no interest in Doge ETFs,” he said. He added that while some newer altcoin products have “performed quite well,” Dogecoin has not.
My conversation with @JSeyff on the current state of crypto ETFs…
We discuss:
-Cryptocurrency ETF sentiment
-150+ crypto-related ETF deposits
-Morgan Stanley Crypto ETFs
-BlackRock’s next move
-Index ETFs and crypto assets
-Recent feeds
-What’s nextvia @CryptoPrimePod pic.twitter.com/mtDuuDirB7
-Nate Geraci (@NateGeraci) January 22, 2026
Seyffart and Geraci converged on a demand thesis: the marginal buyer of DOGE likely already has the tools and habits to buy it directly, rather than through an ETF wrapper.
“I remember talking to the Bitwise guys. I was like, I don’t think anyone is going to buy this,” Seyffart said. “But maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong many times before. But I mean, literally no one has bought like the Doge ETFs (…) I had pretty low expectations, but I thought maybe they could get to a point where they were slightly profitable.”
Seyffart highlighted Bitwise’s product – the ticker BWOW – as an early scorecard: “Its assets are currently less than a million,” he said, calling that “close to zero demand.” He cautioned that the funds were still new, pointing to the Bitwise product launched in late November, but called initial traction “very tiny.”
Geraci’s explanation was more direct: “The people who are buying this, in general, are degens and they already know how to access it. They already have digital wallets. They don’t need an ETF to access it (…). And I think it will be a lot of these other coins that are much further down the market cap spectrum.”
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Geraci argued that Dogecoin faces an additional headwind that doesn’t appear in crypto-native narratives but matters in the ETF market: advisors.
“The other aspect here … is what I call client reporting risk,” Geraci said. “So financial advisors are the main driver of ETF flows. So let’s take Dogecoin as an example… If you’re a financial advisor and a Dogecoin ETF shows up on a client statement… it’s like a flashing red light saying, ‘Please fire me and go find another advisor.'”
This framing is important because the episode repeatedly returns to the realities of the cast. Seyffart said he’s most excited about basket- and index-style crypto ETFs, in part because advisors don’t want to “pick winners and losers” on a long, growing tail of assets. In Geraci’s view, a shopping cart is the “easy button” for professional allocators who want exposure to crypto without subscribing to each token’s story or defending it to clients.
Seyffart also suggested that “what the actual chain does” may shape advisors’ appetite, comparing niche infrastructure plays such as Chainlink, which he described as connecting DeFi and TradFi, to meme assets like DOGE, which he said might be less “appetizing” to ETF buyers.
At press time, DOGE was trading at $0.12479.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
