The price of gold hit an all-time high after US President Donald Trump commented on inflation on his social media platform, but Bitcoin was moving in the opposite direction on Monday, in what could be seen as an example of Bitcoin’s “split personality.”
Over the past two and a half years, there has been a strong correlation between gold, Bitcoin, and the Nasdaq, with all of them ripping higher, IG market analyst Tony Sycamore told Cointelegraph.
“However, there has been a breakdown in the correlation between gold and Bitcoin in recent weeks, which isn’t uncommon for brief periods and comes due to Bitcoin’s split personality.”
“At times, Bitcoin is viewed as a store of value or a safe haven, and at other times it’s viewed as a risk asset,” he added.
The price of gold climbed to its highest ever level on Monday, reaching $3,485 per ounce after a 1% spike, according to GoldPrice. It came after Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, stating, “prices are ‘WAY DOWN’ in the USA, with virtually no inflation.”
Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen to its lowest level since early July in a divergent move.
It fell to a two-month low of $107,290 on Coinbase on Monday morning, according to TradingView. This has resulted in its deepest correction from the mid-August all-time high, as the pullback exceeded 13%.
Bitcoin-gold correlation questioned
“These days, Bitcoin and gold aren’t really moving together,” Vince Yang, co-founder of Ethereum layer-2 platform zkLink, told Cointelegraph.
“The correlation’s been pretty low, even negative at times this year. Gold’s still the classic ‘safe-haven’ play, while Bitcoin is more tied to liquidity and market risk,” he said. “Basically, they balance each other out rather than run side by side.”
However, Sycamore believes the correlation between Bitcoin and gold could eventually realign, as it has done before.
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“Zooming out, I suspect if Trump is going to run the economy red hot and the Fed cuts rates into persistent inflation, Bitcoin’s correlation with gold will reassert itself and both will go higher,” he said.
“It’s just a question from what level Bitcoin finds its toehold,” he added.
Bitcoin could just be lagging gold
Meanwhile, historical data shows Bitcoin’s price rallies within 150 days of gold hitting new all-time highs.
Gold prices reached a new peak above $2,000 in 2020 during the pandemic, which preceded Bitcoin’s surge to an all-time high the following year.
Joe Consorti, head of growth at Theya, said earlier this year that Bitcoin follows gold’s directional bias with a lag of 100-150 days at a time.
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