With Bitcoin Under $80K, Cathie Wood Puts Gold Back Under The Microscope
Bitcoin’s latest slide below the 80,000-dollar mark has revived an old debate on where it fits alongside gold in a world obsessed with inflation, money printing, and financial repression. For Cathie Wood and the ARK Invest team, the recent pullback is not the end of a story but another chapter in a much longer narrative that ties together digital assets, precious metals, and the global money supply.
A Sharp Pullback In A Longer Arc
After an explosive run earlier in the cycle, Bitcoin has given back substantial ground. At the time of the report, the benchmark cryptocurrency hovered around 78,150 dollars, nursing a drawdown of more than 35% from its October 6, 2025 peak. Volatility has surged, liquidations have spiked, and leveraged traders have been forced to reassess risk.
Yet ARK’s messaging remains notably steady. The firm frames this correction as a typical move in an asset still in its monetization phase. Rapid repricings — up and down — are part of the process when a new store-of-value candidate is vying for global recognition. Short-term traders may fixate on intraday swings, but ARK insists the real story unfolds over years, not weeks.
Cathie Wood’s Consistent Crypto Bet
Cathie Wood has built a reputation on taking early, high-conviction positions in transformational technologies, and crypto has been one of her clearest long-term calls. ARK’s funds accumulated exposure to Bitcoin and crypto-linked equities when prices were a fraction of today’s levels, favoring exchange platforms, fintechs with digital-asset rails, and infrastructure providers.
Internal valuation frameworks at ARK outline multiple scenarios in which Bitcoin’s price sits far above current levels by 2030, assuming continued institutional adoption, regulatory normalization, and broader use as a store of value and settlement asset. These are not guarantees but structured projections that highlight how sensitive Bitcoin’s potential valuation is to incremental adoption.
The “Debasement Trade”: Gold, Bitcoin, And Money Supply
The backdrop for both gold and Bitcoin is what many investors call the “debasement trade” — the hunt for assets that can withstand or outpace the erosion of purchasing power caused by aggressive monetary and fiscal policy.
ARK’s research team has recently revisited gold’s relationship with the US M2 money supply. By comparing gold’s total market value with the size of M2, they argue that gold has reached relative valuation extremes not seen since the 1930s and around the 1980 peak. Historically, such stretched readings have often preceded powerful reversals in gold’s price.
After the 1980 blow-off top, gold endured a brutal downturn of roughly 60%, followed by a long period of underperformance. Those historical echoes are not a one-to-one template for today, but they do suggest that even “safe” inflation hedges carry real drawdown risk once the narrative reaches extremes.
Gold’s Cycles Versus Bitcoin’s Cycles
For ARK, one of the key points is that Bitcoin and gold may be part of the same broad macro conversation, but they operate on different cycles and serve distinct roles in portfolios.
Gold is the traditional hedge: an asset with millennia of monetary history, typically moving more slowly and responding to sustained shifts in real rates, currency confidence, and geopolitical anxiety. Bitcoin, by contrast, is younger, thinner in terms of market depth, and still climbing the adoption curve — which magnifies both upside bursts and downside corrections.
ARK emphasizes that using short-term price action to declare a winner between the two misses the structural picture. Gold may be closer to maturity as a monetary asset; Bitcoin, in their view, is still in price discovery mode as it competes for a share of the global store-of-value market that gold currently dominates.
A Weak Link: Low Correlation Between Bitcoin And Gold
One of the common misconceptions is that Bitcoin simply tracks gold as a kind of “digital twin.” ARK’s analysis suggests otherwise. Since early 2020, the correlation between Bitcoin and gold prices has sat at roughly 0.14 — a low figure indicating that on most days, their moves have little in common.
Low correlation does not mean there are no shared themes. In major macro inflection points, both assets can respond to the same catalysts — such as surging inflation expectations or monetary easing. But over the medium term, each asset dances to its own rhythm: gold reacts to real yields and central bank flows, while Bitcoin is driven more by adoption news, regulatory shifts, liquidity conditions, and speculative positioning.
From a portfolio-construction perspective, that low correlation can be seen as a strength. Investors seeking protection against monetary debasement may find that combining both assets can potentially smooth returns, as one does not consistently mirror the other.
When Gold Runs First: Lead-Lag Dynamics
Historically, ARK points out, some of Bitcoin’s strongest bull runs have been preceded by decisive moves in gold. In earlier cycles, capital first migrated into the established safe haven, then later flowed into the riskier upstart once confidence grew and macro fears persisted.
In those episodes, gold’s rally seemed to act as an early signal that investors were rediscovering the debasement theme. Once positioning in gold became crowded, some capital rotated into Bitcoin, amplifying its upside.
This cycle has, so far, broken that familiar pattern. Precious metals saw a sharp spike higher followed by an equally abrupt pullback — but the anticipated follow-through rotation into Bitcoin was muted. Instead, both assets faced turbulence. That divergence raises fresh questions about which groups of investors are driving flows now: are central banks hoarding gold while retail and some institutions hesitate on digital assets? Are regulatory concerns or macro uncertainty slowing the migration into Bitcoin?
Why The 80K Zone Matters For Traders
Technically and psychologically, the region just below 80,000 dollars has become an important battleground for Bitcoin. It sits not far from the levels tested during a violent flash crash in October, making it a reference point for both bulls and bears.
For leveraged traders, this zone acts as a trigger level: breaks below it have historically cascaded into forced liquidations, compounding volatility as margin positions are unwound. For longer-term investors aligned with ARK’s thesis, though, such pullbacks can be reframed as entry points in a multi-year accumulation strategy rather than existential threats.
ARK’s Stance: Adoption, Not Daily Price, Is The Anchor
Despite headline-grabbing volatility, ARK remains anchored to a simple core idea: Bitcoin’s value over time will reflect how widely it is held, how frequently it is used, and how trusted its network becomes as a censorship-resistant, globally accessible asset.
From this perspective, short-term crashes and rallies are noise around a larger signal: address growth, integration into financial rails, institutional participation, development activity, and regulatory clarity. Drawdowns are seen as episodes that shake out leverage and weak hands, while long-term holders and strategic allocators quietly accumulate.
ARK’s long view positions Bitcoin less as a speculative token and more as a proto-monetary asset still in the process of earning its role in the global financial system.
Is Gold Topping Out — Or Simply Catching Its Breath?
While ARK defends Bitcoin’s long-term case, it is also cautious about extrapolating gold’s recent performance indefinitely. The extreme readings in gold’s value versus M2 suggest that, at the very least, the metal may be entering a more fragile phase where further upside is harder to justify without a fresh, powerful macro shock.
That does not mean gold is “finished.” It remains deeply embedded in central bank reserves, jewelry demand, and investor portfolios. However, if the primary driver of its last surge was fear of money supply expansion and currency debasement, then any easing of those fears — or simply exhaustion of new buyers — could open the door to a consolidation or deeper correction.
In ARK’s framing, this is exactly where Bitcoin could eventually differentiate itself: as a digitally native asset with verifiable scarcity and transparent issuance, not bound by physical storage, logistics, or the legacy patterns of commodity markets.
Different Roles In A Modern Portfolio
For investors trying to navigate this landscape, ARK’s research implicitly supports a “both/and” rather than “either/or” stance — with clear distinctions.
Gold remains a conservative hedge, a ballast in times of geopolitical shock and rate instability. Its history and central bank backing give it a kind of institutional legitimacy that Bitcoin is still building. Bitcoin, in contrast, operates as a high-volatility, high-upside bet on a new monetary standard, more akin to early-stage monetary technology than a mature commodity.
Risk tolerance, time horizon, and conviction about technological change will determine how investors allocate between the two. Younger, tech-oriented investors may lean more heavily into Bitcoin, while traditional asset allocators might favor gold and only gradually increase digital exposure as regulatory frameworks solidify.
Why This Debate Matters Beyond Price Charts
The conversation around Bitcoin versus gold is really a conversation about the future of money and savings. In a world of expanding balance sheets, negative real yields, and political polarization, individuals and institutions are searching for assets that cannot be easily diluted or seized.
Gold answers that question with thousands of years of precedent. Bitcoin answers it with code, decentralization, and a permissionless settlement network. ARK’s work underscores that the competition between these assets — and their coexistence — will likely shape how wealth is stored and transferred in the coming decades.
Short-term turbulence, from flash crashes to liquidation cascades, may dominate the headlines. But beneath the surface, the bigger story is still about which assets ultimately earn trust in a world where many worry that traditional money is steadily losing it.
The Takeaway: Don’t Let Volatility Rewrite The Story
With Bitcoin trading below 80,000 dollars and sentiment swinging wildly, it is easy to declare that a cycle has ended or a thesis has failed. ARK pushes back against that impulse. For them, the pullback is a familiar pattern in an immature, rapidly repricing asset, unfolding alongside a potentially overextended gold market shaped by deep-seated money supply fears.
Bitcoin and gold, in ARK’s view, are not simple substitutes and do not move in lockstep. They respond to overlapping but distinct forces, operate on different timelines, and play different roles in a modern portfolio. Judging either asset solely on its most recent price swing risks missing the much larger structural story that is still being written.