That makes the yellow metal roughly 14 times larger than Bitcoin’s current $2.1 trillion valuation and more valuable than all seven of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
Year-to-date, gold has gained an astonishing 60%, easily outpacing both the S&P 500’s 14% and Bitcoin’s 17% climb.
The move jolted global markets and revived demand for traditional hedges. Gold, already buoyed by months of central-bank accumulation, became the go-to asset for investors seeking shelter from currency and policy risk.
“Gold is in demand as countries strive to diversify themselves from the US reserve currency hegemony. We can see that the share of reserve assets held in gold has been steadily increasing and is now as big as reserves held in euros. Hard money is taking share from fiat money, and the dollar is losing market share against gold.”
The same forces pushing gold higher appear to be weighing on Bitcoin, the largest crypto asset by market capitalization.
Still, this price performance marks a 16% decline from the bellwether digital asset’s all-time high of $126,173.
Bitget Wallet CMO James Elkaleh told CryptoSlate that the market pullback reflects short-term panic, not structural weakness. He describes the dip as “early panic-induced selling” triggered by tariff-related shocks.
Meanwhile, Elkaleh argued that Bitcoin would emerge as a winner in the politically charged market environment due to its core value proposition as a non-sovereign hedge against policy risk and currency debasement.
According to him:
“Bitcoin remains a hybrid asset. In the early phase of macro shocks, it trades like risk-on tech equity, selling off alongside other high-beta assets.
Yet as liquidity conditions improve and confidence in traditional markets weakens, it often shifts into a safe-haven role — benefiting from its fixed supply, global accessibility, and separation from state-issued money.”
