Is Bitcoin Really Digital Gold? In 2025, the leading cryptocurrency failed to answer this question
Bitcoin’s sharp retreat from its recent record high has erased its year-to-date gains, leading to questions about aggressive price targets for the cryptocurrency through 2026. But just as important as where Bitcoin’s price will go next is the question of what role Bitcoin actually plays in a portfolio: When will it consistently act as a store of value?
“It’s still going to have to prove that digital business value over an extended period of time,” Nate Geraci, president of NovaDius Wealth Management, said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” podcast.
for years bitcoin has been described as “digital gold,” a comparison that can be powerful and attractive to investors because gold is expected to protect portfolios during periods of broader market stress and moves in a way that is uncorrelated with stocks and other risk assets. But with bitcoin, the digital gold narrative is undermined whenever it trades as a risk asset during stock selloffs. After two different periods of volatility in 2025, Bitcoin was unable to provide a clear answer to the question of digital gold.
“The track record so far is mixed,” Geraci said.
He pointed to a period of “tariff tantrums” when selling stocks in April after President Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, a period of market volatility during which bitcoin performed very well. “That caught the attention of a lot of investors,” he said.
But lately, as weakness in tech stocks has led the market down, most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, have also sold off. Bitcoin, in particular, was selling significantly higher than the stock market, he noted.
“The jury is still out,” Geraci said.
The performance of Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 this year.
Geraci stressed that in the long term, he believes bitcoin is “going down that path and will behave much more like the physical metal itself.”
But he added that for now he behaves more like an unstable “teenager”.
“It’s only 15 to 16 years old, so it still has to prove itself as a digital store of value,” he said.
Gold, on the other hand, has thousands of years of experience.
“His story is still in its early chapters,” Geraci wrote in a follow-up email to CNBC.
The price of bitcoin and gold since the beginning of 2025.
Geraci said it’s good to have some perspective during any short-term bout of volatility. While bitcoin has fallen more than 25% since its all-time high in October (the loss from the record high to the recent low was an even steeper 35%), its value has more than doubled since January 2024, when spot bitcoin ETFs entered the market following SEC approval.
Additionally, while spot bitcoin ETFs have seen billions in outflows over the past month, they have attracted roughly $22 billion in inflows since the start of the year.
He thinks that while bitcoin’s recent fall began as a function of a selloff in tech stocks and a broader stock market selloff, leverage in the crypto market ended up playing a big role in the long-term decline. “I just thought there was a lot of leverage in this category that needed to be flushed out,” he said. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing now.
Beyond bitcoin itself, Geraci thinks crypto-index ETFs, portfolios that invest in a basket of digital assets rather than tracking the spot market in any single cryptocurrency, could become a way for more investors to seek diversification into a new asset class.
But he also thinks bitcoin will be an exception in the crypto market, where he expects many assets to continue to trade more like tech stocks and investors should expect to fall with stocks as the stock market declines.
“Bitcoin aside, I see most other crypto tokens as risk assets – much closer to high-growth tech stocks than stores of value. Their investment case is tied to the future of stablecoins, tokenization and decentralized finance,” Geraci wrote in an email.