Gold has outperformed bitcoin by more than 70 percentage points over the past year, according to Protos. The outlet said gold climbed 28% from $3,400 to $4,330, while BTC dropped 44% from $117,000 to $65,000 over the same period.
Protos also said that over the past three years, holding so-called digital gold instead of physical gold would still have produced a return a couple of percentage points lower, even after 36 months.
A chart included in the report, sourced from TradingView, compared gold and BTC performance over the trailing 12 months.
Bitcoin fell sharply from its peak while gold set a record
Protos wrote that bitcoin has fallen away from a financial peak, not just a psychological one. The report said BTC reached an all-time high near $126,200 on October 6, 2025 and has since declined 48%.
Gold set its own record soon after. Spot prices rose to $5,589 per ounce on January 28, 2026, which Protos described as a nominal high that also stood above the metal’s inflation-adjusted 1980 peak. The metal later pulled back from that spike, but the article said it never came close to surrendering its year-over-year gain. Bitcoin, by contrast, halved.
$1 in gold versus $1 in BTC a year ago
Protos framed the comparison in simple dollar terms. A dollar held in gold a year ago would now be worth about $1.28, the report said. A dollar held in BTC would be worth about $0.55.
The article argued that bitcoin advocates have spent a decade comparing BTC to a global store of value, but that performance over the last few years has stalled that case. Over the past year, Protos said, the comparison is nowhere close to financial reality.
The piece also cited Michael Burry, who wrote in February, “BTC has been exposed as a purely speculative asset, and is not near the debasement trade hedge that gold and other precious metals are.” Protos said BTC traded near $77,000 that day, already well below its October peak, and has fallen another 16% since then.
Central banks and ETF flows favored gold
Beyond price performance, the report pointed to demand trends. Central banks added 863 tonnes of gold to sovereign reserves in 2025, Protos said, calling that historically elevated even though it was slower than the previous year.
None of those purchases went into BTC, the article said. Protos noted that some of bitcoin’s institutional backers had long argued central banks would eventually buy it in the same way they buy gold.
Gold ETF investors also changed direction. Holdings moved from a small net outflow in 2024 to net inflows of more than 800 tonnes in 2025, according to the World Gold Council. Protos noted that crypto investors used to celebrate this type of shift when money rotated into bitcoin ETFs rather than gold funds.
Bitcoin-related setbacks added to the contrast
Protos said that while gold sat in vaults and preserved its value, the BTC community fractured. The outlet wrote that Michael Saylor’s Strategy sold BTC for the first time since 2022. It also said critics of Bitcoin Core v30 proposed a hard fork of the blockchain and a change to proof-of-work.
The article added that Coldcard, described as the most popular BTC-only hardware wallet, suffered a catastrophic bug.
Protos says gold led over the periods that matter most to recent buyers
The report did note that the story has more than one side. BTC has had shorter stretches and earlier periods in which it outpaced gold. Since its formative years in the 2010s, Protos said, bitcoin has far outperformed the metal.
Still, for anyone who bought either asset more recently, Protos argued that the last 12 and 36 months matter more. Over those windows, it said, gold has not only beaten BTC but trounced it by 70 percentage points over the past year. In that framing, “digital gold” describes what bitcoin was supposed to be, not what it actually delivered.