Bitcoin’s sharp decline from its recent record high has erased its year-to-date gains, leading to questions about the cryptocurrency’s aggressive price targets through 2026. But as important as the future direction of Bitcoin’s price is the question of what role Bitcoin actually plays in a portfolio: When will it consistently behave as a store of value?
“It’s still going to have to prove itself as a digital store value over a longer period of time,” Nate Geraci, president of NovaDius Wealth Management, said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” podcast.
For years, bitcoin has been described as “digital gold”, a comparison that can be powerful and attractive to investors since gold is believed to protect portfolios during periods of broader market stress, moving in a manner uncorrelated to stocks and other risky assets. But for bitcoin, the digital gold narrative is undermined every time it trades as a risk asset during stock sales. After two distinct periods of volatility in 2025, bitcoin has been unable to provide a clear answer to the digital gold question.
“The record so far is mixed,” Geraci said.
He pointed to the “tariff crisis” period of stock selling in April after President Trump announced drastic global tariffs, a period of market volatility during which bitcoin performed very well. “This attracted the attention of many investors,” he said.
But more recently, as weakness in tech stocks has dragged the market lower, most cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, have also sold off. Bitcoin, in particular, has sold significantly more than the stock market, he noted.
“The jury is still out,” Geraci said.
Performance of Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 this year.
Geraci emphasized that in the long term, he believes bitcoin “is heading down a path to behave much more like the physical metal itself.”
But he added that for now, he’s behaving more like an unstable “teenager.”
“It is only 15 or 16 years old and therefore still needs to prove itself as a digital store of value,” he said.
Gold, on the other hand, has a millennia-old history.
“His story is in its early chapters,” Geraci wrote in a follow-up email to CNBC.
Bitcoin and gold prices year-to-date in 2025.
Geraci said it’s good to have some perspective during any period of short-term volatility. While bitcoin is down more than 25% since its record price in October (from its all-time high to its recent low, the loss was an even greater 35%), its value has more than doubled since January 2024, when there was an influx of spot bitcoin ETFs into the market following SEC approvals.
Additionally, although spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen multibillion-dollar outflows over the past month, year-to-date they have attracted approximately $22 billion in inflows.
He believes that while the recent Bitcoin crash began as a function of tech stock selling and a broader stock market sell-off, leverage in the crypto market ultimately played a significant role in the prolonged decline. “I just think there was a lot of influence in the category that needed to be eliminated,” he said. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing now.”
Beyond bitcoin itself, Geraci believes crypto index ETFs, portfolios that invest in a basket of digital assets rather than tracking a single cryptocurrency’s spot market, could become a way for more investors to seek diversification in the new asset class.
But he also thinks Bitcoin will be an outlier in the crypto market, where he expects many assets to continue to trade more like tech stocks and where investors should expect to see them fall alongside stocks during stock market declines.
“Putting bitcoin aside, I view most other crypto tokens as risk assets – much closer to high-growth tech stocks than stores of value. Their investment case is tied to the future of stablecoins, tokenization, and decentralized finance,” Geraci wrote via email.
