Bitcoin (BTC) and gold have followed very different paths through 2026. Since the start of 2024, gold has surged about 153%, while Bitcoin is down roughly 30% over the same period.
Fidelity’s global macro director Jurrien Timmer said this divergence fits a backdrop of steady global money-supply growth, weaker speculative demand for tech names, and falling exchange balances for crypto — factors that together are reshaping how the two assets trade.
Timmer noted that gold has behaved like a classic hard-money asset in this bull phase, with sharp pullbacks quickly bought. Over time, Bitcoin also tracks global money-supply growth (shown by rising global M2), but its largest rallies have come when liquidity expansion coincided with strong gains in software and SaaS stocks — a proxy for speculative appetite. In 2017–2018 and again in 2020–2021, software stocks rose roughly 58% and 93% year-over-year, and Bitcoin rallied sharply in those windows. By contrast, software stocks plunged about 58% in 2022 and Bitcoin suffered a deep drawdown even as money-supply levels remained high.
The takeaway: money-supply growth underpins longer-term trends for both assets, while shifts in tech-sector speculation tend to amplify or mute Bitcoin’s moves. That makes Bitcoin partly a hard-money play but also a high-beta, speculation-sensitive instrument. Timmer’s view is that liquidity remains ample but speculative sentiment is in a bear phase, a mix that has seen gold rally with money supply while Bitcoin lags.
Demand on crypto-native venues has also rotated toward gold-linked products. Binance launched around-the-clock gold futures on Jan. 5; cumulative volume in that product is approaching $35 billion, with more than $4 billion on the busiest day and a weekly average near $4.7 billion, per crypto analyst Darkfrost. Activity surged after gold experienced a two-day correction exceeding 20%, highlighting appetite for tokenized exposure to traditional hard assets on crypto platforms.
At the same time, CryptoQuant data show Binance’s total portfolio value across BTC, ETH, XRP and major ERC20/TRC20 stablecoins fell to roughly $102 billion — the lowest since April 2025 and down from about $140 billion in August 2025. That roughly $38 billion decline reflects lower asset prices and user withdrawals into self-custody during bearish periods.
For Bitcoin, lower on-exchange capital suggests more cautious trader positioning and thinner near-term liquidity, factors that can exacerbate price swings and make it harder for BTC to capture broad money-supply-driven gains while speculative enthusiasm toward tech stocks remains muted.
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