The race for gold is starting to look less like a constant trend and more like a mass event.
The yellow metal surpassed $5,500 an ounce on Wednesday evening, and at that rate, its notional value increased by about $1.6 trillion in a single day, roughly the size of bitcoin’s entire market capitalization.
It’s a powerful comparison that comes with fine print, because gold’s “market cap” is an estimate based on above-ground supply, not a float-adjusted stock-style metric.
But it captures the mood: In the market’s version of a writedown, cash goes to the old hedge first.
The sentiment reflects this division. Gold-focused indicators now point to “extreme greed,” while crypto’s own Fear and Greed indicators remained stuck in the opposite zone for much of the month.
The JM Bullion Gold Fear & Greed Index is a 0-100 sentiment gauge constructed from five inputs: physical gold premiums, spot price volatility, social media tone, JM Bullion retail buying/selling, and Google Trends interest. Low values suggest fear and capitulation, while high values suggest a strong uptrend. This is a contrarian signal and not a price prediction.
Silver is also fueling the precious metals narrative, with big weekly gains and sharp intraday swings that look more like a positioning squeeze than a slow accumulation story.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, still trades as a high-beta risk asset that requires clean liquidity conditions and a clear catalyst.
It was hovering around $80,000, which remains well below October’s high, even as metals went wild and headlines continued to fuel the “hard asset” theme. This is troublesome for the macro narrative that many crypto investors have relied on: bitcoin should act like digital gold when confidence in currencies and fiscal policy starts to waver.
This gap does not mean that the thesis is dead. Bitcoin has outperformed most assets over longer windows and can move quickly when flows return.
But the last few weeks have reminded us that the “store of value” depends as much on who is buying and why, as it does on the narrative.
Right now, the fringe buyer looking for shelter chooses bars and coins – not tokens and wallets – and bitcoin is set to prove, once again, what it’s for.
