Bitcoin Tracks Gold as Key Bottom Signal Emerges

Bitcoin looks set to behave differently on the financial markets. Its correlation with the Nasdaq is falling sharply, while its correlation with gold is climbing to the highest level of the past year. At the same time, a striking on-chain signal has emerged. When Bitcoin was trading around $60.000, more than half of all BTC was sitting on a loss. In earlier cycles, such a situation has mainly arisen around heavy capitulation phases.

Bitcoin increasingly decouples from the Nasdaq

A chart from Bloomberg and Grayscale Investments shows a clear shift. The correlation between Bitcoin’s daily returns and the Nasdaq stood at around 60% at the end of 2025, but by the end of August 2026 it is down to roughly 33%.

Gold tells the opposite story. The 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and gold has risen from about 20% at the end of 2025 to more than 50% in August. Bitcoin is therefore currently tracking the precious metal more closely than the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

According to Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, this development fits with the idea that investors increasingly treat Bitcoin as a scarce store of value.

A correlation of more than 50% does not, of course, mean that Bitcoin is becoming the same asset as gold. It only shows that daily price moves have more often pointed in the same direction over the measured period.

More than half of all Bitcoin was underwater

A second data point makes the current situation interesting. Around the recent Bitcoin price of roughly $60.000, more than 50% of the circulating supply was sitting on an unrealised loss. That means this BTC last changed hands at a higher price.

Historically, the 50% threshold has occurred relatively rarely. The accompanying analysis shows similar situations in 2015, 2018, 2020 and 2022. These are all periods that ultimately ended up close to significant Bitcoin bottoms.

Still, it is important not to automatically infer an exact bottom from this. The chart explicitly describes 50% of the supply at a loss as a capitulation zone rather than a guaranteed bottom signal.

In 2015, for example, Bitcoin was still roughly 2% lower twelve months after such a moment. After comparable signals in 2018 and 2022, the chart by contrast shows a rise of around 55% and 39% respectively. The exceptional recovery period from 2020 even delivered more than 1.000%.

Two signals point to a changing market picture

The situation has since shifted again. The chart places Bitcoin at around $77.600 and indicates that roughly 31.2% of the supply is still at a loss. The rapid price rally is therefore pulling a large part of the market back above its cost basis.

Taken together, the data paint a striking picture. Bitcoin is recovering from a zone that has historically often appeared during capitulation, while its correlation with equities is at the same time falling sharply and its correlation with gold is rising.

Whether this actually marks a lasting bottom cannot yet be deduced from these figures. What is clear, however, is that the current market structure differs markedly from a few months ago, when Bitcoin was moving much more strongly with US technology stocks.