Bitcoin’s three-month rolling correlation with gold has climbed to its highest level in nearly six years, while its correlation with US equities has dropped to a one-year low. The shift has reopened one of the market’s longest-running debates: whether Bitcoin should be treated as “digital gold.”
The analysis was written by André Dragosch, Bitwise’s head of European research, and compiled by Luffy of Foresight News. Supporters of the digital-gold thesis argue that Bitcoin shares several structural traits with gold. Both assets are scarce, fungible and divisible, and both can be held without relying on a third-party custodian.
Critics focus on Bitcoin’s market history. Bitcoin has suffered several drawdowns of 50% to 80%, making its price behavior very different from gold. It was also created far more recently than gold and has not achieved the same level of acceptance as a store of value.
Bitcoin and gold move more closely together
August brought a major macroeconomic event. Yields on US 10-year and 30-year Treasury bonds moved higher, after which US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervened in the market and increased purchases of longer-dated bonds. The analysis says the intervention signaled a possible move into a new period of financial repression and yield-curve control.
After the intervention took place, Bitcoin posted a 22.4% weekly gain, its strongest weekly performance since March 2024. One detail, the analysis says, was overlooked by many investors: Bitcoin and gold moved closely together during the rally.
Gold gained about 5% over the same week, while US stocks declined. The three-month rolling correlation between Bitcoin and gold rose to a level close to its highest point in six years.
The last time the correlation reached a similar level was during the COVID-19 period in 2020, when governments introduced multiple rounds of fiscal and monetary easing. The analysis identifies two historical periods in which Bitcoin and gold reached peak correlation: the two phases when governments carried out large-scale interventions in the macroeconomic market.
Bitcoin separates from stocks and stays negatively correlated with the dollar
At the same time, Bitcoin’s correlation with US equities fell to a one-year low. That points to a decoupling between hard assets and the stock market. Against that backdrop, the argument that Bitcoin is merely a leveraged technology growth stock may no longer hold.
Bitcoin’s 90-day rolling correlation with the Nasdaq 100 Index has also declined from its previous high. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has shown a pronounced negative correlation with the US Dollar Index, or DXY. When the dollar comes under pressure and weakens, Bitcoin and gold have tended to benefit.
Currency-depreciation hedge
The analysis does not equate Bitcoin with gold. Gold is a mature store of value with thousands of years of history. Bitcoin is less than two decades old and remains a new type of asset. When macroeconomic risk is not the main market focus, the price paths of the two assets can still diverge sharply.
The distinction becomes less clear when macro conditions turn tense and macro variables impose strong constraints on markets. Faced with the risk of currency depreciation, investors are increasingly blurring the line between choosing gold and choosing Bitcoin. In such conditions, Bitcoin is beginning to behave like a more elastic version of gold.
Gold has a market worth about $30 trillion. Its holders mainly include central banks, sovereign institutions and large asset-allocation firms. That pool of capital is far larger than the venture capital and crypto-native capital that dominated Bitcoin’s pricing in its earlier development.
If Bitcoin formally enters the store-of-value asset category, its valuation framework would be measured against a much larger market benchmark. The correlation data also suggests that investors are no longer simply choosing between gold and Bitcoin as a hedge against currency depreciation. Instead, they are allocating to both assets at the same time to hedge risk.
For the past 15 years, Bitcoin has been priced mainly as a risk asset. Dragosch argues that if the strong correlation between Bitcoin and gold continues, Bitcoin’s value narrative could be fundamentally rewritten over the next 15 years.