Gold up 28%, $BTC down 44%: the boomer metal just dunked on "digital gold" 🥇

Gold has rallied 28% over the past year, climbing from $3,400 to $4,330, and outperformed $BTC by more than 70 percentage points over the same window. $BTC fell 44% from $117,000 to $65,000, extending a stretch in which holding the physical metal has beaten the cryptocurrency designed to replace it. Across the trailing three years, gold has also edged ahead of $BTC by a few percentage points despite 36 months of patience from digital-asset holders.

The divergence follows record prints on both sides. $BTC reached an all-time high near $126,200 on October 6, 2025 and has since declined about 48%. Spot gold hit a nominal high of $5,589 per ounce on January 28, 2026, a level that also sits well above the metal's inflation-adjusted 1980 peak; gold has since pulled back but retained its year-over-year gain. A dollar invested in gold a year ago is worth roughly $1.28 today, while a dollar invested in $BTC is worth about $0.55.

Institutional flows reinforced the split. Central banks added 863 tonnes of gold to sovereign reserves in 2025, a historically elevated total, albeit a slower pace than the prior year; none of those purchases flowed into $BTC, despite long-standing predictions from some proponents that central banks would eventually buy the asset. Gold ETF holdings swung from a small net outflow in 2024 to inflows of more than 800 tonnes in 2025, according to the World Gold Council.

Investors and developers in the $BTC ecosystem faced additional strain during the period. Strategy, Michael Saylor's company, sold $BTC for the first time since 2022, critics of Bitcoin Core v30 proposed a hard fork and a proof-of-work change, and Coldcard, a popular $BTC-only hardware wallet, disclosed a bug that co-founders have publicly addressed. Investor Michael Burry wrote in February that "$BTC has been exposed as a purely speculative asset, and is not near the debasement trade hedge that gold and other precious metals are"; $BTC traded near $77,000 that day and has fallen roughly 16% since.

On shorter and earlier time horizons, $BTC has at times outpaced and historically far outperformed gold, including across the 2010s. Over the 12 and 36 months most relevant to current portfolios, however, the comparison stands in gold's favor.