Bitcoin's sharp decline from its recent record high has wiped out its year-to-date gains, and that has led to questions about aggressive price targets for the cryptocurrency through 2026. But just as important as the next development of the Bitcoin price is the question of the role Bitcoin really plays in a portfolio: When will it behave like a store of value over the long term?
“It still needs to prove itself as a digital store asset over a sustained 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 meaningful and attractive to investors because gold is expected to protect portfolios during times of general market stress and to move in a manner that is not correlated with stocks and other risk assets. But with Bitcoin, the digital gold narrative is undermined whenever it trades like a risk asset during stock sales. After two pronounced periods of volatility in 2025, Bitcoin was unable to provide a clear answer to the question of digital gold.
“The track record so far is mixed,” Geraci said.
He pointed to the “tariff tantrum” period of stock sales in April after President Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, a period of market volatility during which Bitcoin performed very well. “That caught the attention of a lot of investors,” he said.
But more recently, as weakness in tech stocks led the market lower, most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, also saw a selloff. Bitcoin in particular was sold off significantly more than the stock market, he noted.
“The jury is still out,” Geraci said.
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The performance of Bitcoin and Nasdaq 100 this year.
Geraci emphasized that in the long term, he believes Bitcoin is “heading down the path of behaving much more like the physical metal itself.”
But he added that it was acting more like an unpredictable “teenager” at the moment.
“It’s only 15 to 16 years old, so it still has to prove itself as a digital store of value,” he said.
Gold, on the other hand, has a success story that goes back thousands of years.
“The story is still in its infancy,” Geraci wrote in a follow-up email to CNBC.
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Year-to-date price of Bitcoin and gold in 2025.
Geraci said it was good to have some perspective during a short-term period of volatility. While Bitcoin has fallen over 25% since its record high in October (from its record high to its recent low, the loss was an even steeper 35%), its value has more than doubled since January 2024, when there was an influx of spot Bitcoin ETFs into the market following SEC approval.
Additionally, while spot Bitcoin ETFs saw billions of dollars in outflows last month, they have seen around $22 billion in inflows since the start of the year.
He believes that while the recent Bitcoin crash began as a result of the sell-off in tech stocks and a broader stock market sell-off, leverage in the crypto market ultimately played a large role in the ongoing decline. “I just think there was a lot of leverage in that 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 reflecting the spot market in a single cryptocurrency, could be a way for more investors to seek diversification in the new asset class.
But he also believes Bitcoin will be an exception in the crypto market, where he expects many assets to continue trading more like technology stocks and investors should expect them to fall right alongside stocks during stock market declines.
“Aside from Bitcoin, 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.