Bitcoin struggles to be ‘digital gold’ as scared investors choose real gold instead

Backers of the world’s largest cryptocurrency have long described Bitcoin as “digital gold"— a store of value to shelter one’s fortunes in a market meltdowns. During the recent Trump tariff-inspired market downturn, however, Bitcoin has tanked while gold has weathered the storm. The world’s largest cryptocurrency dropped 12% to below $80,000 since Trump rolled out an aggressive suite of tariffs on Wednesday afternoon. Meanwhile, gold’s composite price has dropped only 3% to $3,039 as of Friday afternoon, according to data from Refinitiv.

The lack of correlation between the two assets under President Donald Trump’s administration is even starker. Since January, gold has risen 16% while Bitcoin has dipped 14%. Notably, stocks have also dropped around 14%—a challenge to the cryptocurrency's aspiration to be a digital version of gold.

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Bitcoin, initially, didn’t budge after news of the tariffs wiped out trillions of dollars in market value. Proponents of the cryptocurrency cheered on the asset’s resilience. “For the first time in history, Bitcoin is not moving in lockstep with the stock market. It's now behaving like a hedge to geopolitical uncertainty,” Tyler Winklevoss, the cofounder of the crypto exchange Gemini, said in a post on X on Sunday. 

Shortly after Winklevoss posted, however, Bitcoin dipped and notched its worst price of 2025. The cryptocurrency’s correlation with the broader stock market mirrors past dips. From February to March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic rattled investor confidence, the world’s largest cryptocurrency plummeted 30% and the S&P 500 dropped 34%.

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During a 2022 stock slump, meanwhile, Bitcoin performed worse than the S&P 500—and considerably worse than gold:

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And in 2022, as the pandemic disrupted global supply chains and ushered in an inflationary crisis, Bitcoin dropped 60% as the S&P 500 tanked 23%.

The stock market rout follows a chaotic beginning to Trump’s presidency and an aggressive slate of tariffs the 47th president announced Wednesday against China, the European Union, and a slew of other countries. “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom,” Trump said shortly after he unveiled the tariffs, which were calculated through a simple mathematical formula.

The markets, though, did not boom. “Many countries will likely end up in a recession. You can throw most forecasts out the door, if this tariff rate stays on for an extended period of time,” wrote Fitch Ratings in a research note.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com