BTC is competing with silver to become the best-performing asset for 2025 to date. Precious metals trade near an all-time high, with silver catching up with outsized gains. 

Silver is challenging BTC as the fastest-growing asset for 2025. In the year-to-date, the metal added a net 63.9% to its price, while BTC locked in 64.1% net gains. The recent price weakness for BTC and a dip to a lower price range, even above $100K, will put the digital asset’s net gains below the performance of silver. 

At the beginning of 2025, BTC traded at 3,404 silver ounces, an all-time peak. Since then, even with price records, BTC declined to the equivalent of 2,101 silver ounces. Still, BTC is up from its lows of 692 silver ounces during the 2023 bear market. 

Historically, BTC still outperformed precious metals on a longer time scale, as a first-of-a-kind asset in a period of price discovery.

Silver and gold became an integral part of the “debasement trade,” seeking assets to offset the weakness of the US dollar and fiat currencies. As Cryptopolitan reported, the debasement trade led to speculative gains for gold, which appreciated more reliably than BTC. However, silver caught up with bigger gains, breaking a multi-decade run of relatively subdued prices. 

Skeptics about the debasement trade see it as a bet on already overheated assets, which do not necessarily store value. As a debasement trade asset, BTC is also much riskier, as it has erased up to 10% of its value within hours. 

On a four-year time frame, gold was also the #1 gainer, as BTC lagged during its two-year bear market. Gold is also catching up with BTC, already 58.2% up for the year to date. 

Tokenized silver remains a niche asset

While silver has a well-established mainstream market, it is relatively niche as a tokenized asset. 

Silver-based tokens only have a market cap of $203M even after the recent price appreciation. Most of the value is locked in the Kinesis Silver token. 

The silver-based tokens are also only traded on the Kinesis platform, with no connections to larger exchanges or DeFi. Overall, tokenized silver is still a niche asset, trading away from the overall RWA tokenization trend. 

Will BTC catch up with precious metals? 

BTC remains more volatile and unpredictable, though there are expectations the digital coin may catch up with gold. 

BTC is often historically lagging by about 60 days from gold, thus expecting a renewed attempt at a new high in the coming months. 

However, the debasement narrative may also shift if the government debt market normalizes. While the debasement trade seems logical, it may also reverse if currencies show a return to sufficient reliability. 

For gold and silver, the rush for spot demand is already creating backlogs and logistical problems. BTC as a debasement asset also suffers from even faster depreciation, often acting as a more volatile equivalent to tech stocks.

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