Instead of obsessing over how high Bitcoin could climb in 2026, some market professionals are shifting the conversation in a very different direction.
The real question, they argue, is far more fundamental: What exactly is Bitcoin supposed to be in a portfolio?
Bitcoin’s steep reversal from its peak this year has reignited that discussion, forcing investors to re-evaluate assumptions that many had treated as settled.
Key Takeaways
Bitcoin’s pullback has forced analysts to revisit the question of whether it truly behaves like a store of value.
Nate Geraci says Bitcoin has shown conflicting behavior during market stress and needs much more time to mature.
Most crypto assets continue to trade like high-risk tech plays, leaving Bitcoin in a category of its own.
A Store of Value — or Just Another Risk Asset?
For more than a decade, Bitcoin supporters have pitched it as a digital alternative to gold. The comparison is appealing: gold protects portfolios when markets fall, and its behavior is mostly independent from stocks. Bitcoin, in theory, should eventually behave the same way.
But practice hasn’t matched the narrative.
Nate Geraci, who heads NovaDius Wealth Management, says the crypto market still doesn’t have clear evidence that Bitcoin can fill that role. Speaking on CNBC’s “ETF Edge,” he explained that Bitcoin has shown moments of independence, but those moments have been inconsistent and short-lived.
The issue isn’t price performance, he said — it’s reliability.
Two Very Different Stress Tests Produced Two Opposite Results
Geraci points back to the spring, when President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping global tariffs triggered a sharp equity sell-off. During that event — quickly nicknamed the “tariff tantrum” — Bitcoin rose instead of falling. That brief decoupling attracted attention because it looked like Bitcoin was finally behaving like a defensive asset.
But the pattern didn’t hold.
When tech stocks slumped months later, Bitcoin fell even harder than the equity market. Instead of being a safe-haven, it behaved like a high-volatility growth asset. According to Geraci, these contradictions make it difficult to argue that Bitcoin has fully stepped into the “digital gold” role investors want it to play.
A Teenager in Asset-Class Terms
The long-term view, Geraci says, requires patience.
Gold’s reputation was built over thousands of years; Bitcoin has existed for barely half a generation. Comparing the two today, he argues, is like comparing a high school student to a seasoned adult.
He believes that as the market matures — through broader ownership, deeper liquidity, and repeated macro cycles — Bitcoin could eventually settle into a more stable behavioral pattern. But for now, it is still too young, too reactive, and too intertwined with risk assets to be considered a true store of value.
Volatility Remains Part of the Story
The past few months illustrate that point clearly. Since October’s peak, Bitcoin has dropped more than 25%, and measuring from high to low, the drawdown approaches 35%. Yet despite that tumble, Bitcoin is still more than double its value from early 2024 — a reminder of how wild its performance can be on both ends of the spectrum.
Part of the recent sell-off came from extremely stretched positioning. Leverage had built up throughout the year, and Geraci believes the latest correction was partly “a cleansing event” that flushed out excess risk.
Meanwhile, spot Bitcoin ETFs have pulled in roughly $22 billion year to date, even after several weeks of outflows — another sign that institutional interest hasn’t disappeared, even if conviction is being tested.
Why Bitcoin Stands Alone in the Crypto Asset Class
Geraci also distinguishes Bitcoin from the rest of the market.
While he sees potential for broad crypto-index ETFs — products that spread exposure across many tokens — he argues that most crypto assets behave nothing like gold and nothing like Bitcoin. Their price action looks far more similar to high-growth tech stocks whose futures depend on adoption curves: stablecoins, tokenized assets, decentralized finance, and other emerging use cases.
In that sense, Bitcoin may eventually be the only cryptocurrency to graduate into the “store of value” category, while everything else follows a growth-asset trajectory.
