Coin Bureau：央行购金与机构资金流向解析比特币跑输原因

Just a year ago, one Bitcoin bought you 34.72 ounces of gold. Today, it buys 14.2. Over the same 12 months, gold is up 31% and Bitcoin is down 46%, which means the asset that was supposed to be the hedge against monetary debasement lost more than half its value against the asset it was supposed to replace. Now, the draw down is one thing, but the ratio is another because a Bitcoin holder lost more than just dollars this year.

They [music] lost 59% of their purchasing power against gold. But there is one window inside this data where things [music] look quite different and it happens to be the most recent one. So today we're breaking down what drove gold's epic run, why Bitcoin has been lagging, and where this ratio goes from here. My name is DC and this is the Coin Bureau. Okay, let's start our analysis with gold. Gold's bull run has largely been driven by a foundation of buying from the deepest pockets on the planet.

In the second quarter of 2026, central banks bought a record of 289 tons of gold, according to the World Gold Council. That's up between 62 and 74% yearonear, and it's more than five times the revised first quarter figure of 57 tons. Across the first half of this year, sovereign accumulation came in at 345 tons and the single largest buy in that quarter was Poland. The National Bank of Poland added 51 tons, taking its reserves to 632 tons by June.

China's central bank added 33 tons over the same quarter, extending an unbroken buying streak to 21 consecutive months and then added roughly another 20 tons in July alone, pushing official holdings above 2366 tons. Usbekistan added 16 tons. Kazakhstan added 15 tons. And the one that raised most eyebrows, the Bank of Korea put 250 million into a gold ETF at the end of the second quarter, its first gold link purchase in 13 years.

Now, this is reserve managers changing their mind about what a reserve actually is. And they're not finished either. In this year's World Gold Council survey, a record 45% of central banks said they intend to add to their gold reserves over the next 12 months. Not only that, but 83% named diversification away from the US dollar as the reason. Now, in all fairness, this wasn't a one-way street. Russia sold roughly 44 tons in the first half of the year under fiscal pressure, taking its holdings down to 2,282 tons by July, and Ghana ended its central bank buying program entirely.

So, the official sector isn't unanimous, but the net direction is about as clear as this kind of data ever gets. And the price action tracks the macro almost perfectly. A hot May inflation print at 4.2% 2% yearonear, the highest since April 2023, combined with strong jobs data and a more restrictive posture from new Fed chair Kevin Walsh. And gold went into a 25% draw down that bottomed in late June. Then July arrived.

The economy lost 23,000 jobs against expectations of 85,000 gained. Inflation cooled to around 3.4% and gold started climbing straight back up. Silver went even harder, up 73% over 12 months. So, if the macro was that supportive, why didn't Bitcoin catch any of it? What if you could trade real US stocks like Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla without leaving your crypto account? Well, that's the idea behind our tokens from BitGet.

These are tokenized stocks backed one to one by real shares. But the key difference is they are actually usable. You can trade them, use them as margin, and even earn dividends instead of just letting them sit in your [music] wallet. So, if you want to check them out for yourself, sign up for BitGet using the link in the description or by scanning this QR code. Well, this is the uncomfortable part, and we're not going to soften it.

Bitcoin's six-month correlation to the NASDAQ 100 currently sits at plus.62. Golds, by contrast, has been running somewhere between slightly negative and roughly flat. On shorter rolling windows, Bitcoin's correlation to tech has been reported as high as85 to88 this year, among the strongest readings on record against a 5-year average closer to 0.54. And the volatility gap does the rest of the work. Bitcoin has been running at 52% annualized volatility.

Gold at just 21.5%. So, you're holding an asset that moves two and a half times as violently as gold in the same direction as the riskiest part of the equity market. That's far from ideal. Now, despite that, Bitcoin did not fail as an asset this year. It failed as an uncorrelated asset. Consider who the marginal buyer of Bitcoin actually became this cycle. It's no longer the person moving coins into a cold storage with a 10-year horizon.

It's an allocator holding an ETF in the same brokerage account in the same risk bucket monitored by the same risk manager as their tech exposure. Black Rockck IBIT had accumulated over 86,700 Bitcoin by April. And when that book d-risks, it doesn't d-risk Bitcoin because anything happening in Bitcoin, it derisks Bitcoin because the whole risk sleeve got cut. And Bitcoin is the most liquid, most volatile thing inside it.

Gold sits in a different bucket. So, gold didn't move and the behavior is asymmetric as well, which is the painful bit. Bitcoin's participation in equity rallies has been muted while its downside has been severe with a 5% NASDAQ pullback translating in double-digit Bitcoin drawdowns once the leverage liquidations kick in. And there's a competition element to this as well. Research desk K33 flagged this year that capital rotating into AI created an opportunity cost for holding Bitcoin with BlackRock's future AI and tech ETF. up 39% through July.

So, Bitcoin's correlation problem is not a flaw that appeared out of nowhere. It's the direct consequence of the institutional adoption that almost everyone in this market spent years begging for. Be careful what you wish for. Now, keeping track of two markets that are now moving on the same macro data, but in opposite directions, is frankly a bit of a headache, which is why we made it a lot easier for you because right here on YouTube, you can join the Coin Bureau Club light plan.

You'll get daily coverage across both crypto and trapi, our teams read on how the market is positioned and where the actual opportunities are. We've made the live plan super affordable so it's accessible to all. And if you sign up now, your first month is absolutely free. Just tap the join button below this video to get started. Right back to the gold and digital gold. Now, if you scroll through finance Twitter, you'll see people loudly declaring that gold beat Bitcoin.

But let's scrutinize that a bit. For one thing, they're all running the 12-month number. Run the six-month number instead, and Bitcoin is down 6% while gold is down 8.6%. So, Bitcoin has been the better performer since February. Full stop. Gold's 12-month outperformance was almost entirely earned in one concentrated window that ended earlier this year. And gold is now sitting roughly 21% below its all-time high, near $5,600 an ounce that it set back in January.

That said, we do have to be careful here because 6 months is a very short window and one quarter of relative strength is not exactly a trend, but it does tell you that the flows and the price have already started to separate. So, let's look at the flows on the gold side. Global goldbacked ETFs now hold around $530 billion in assets with holdings at 4,68 tons, just under the all-time high set in February. July brought in $3 billion, reversing two straight months of outflows with Europe leading.

The largest single fund, GLD, sits at roughly $82.5 billion in assets with somewhere around $4.8 billion of net inflows year to date. And on the Bitcoin side, US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded their worst half year on record in the first half of 2026 with $5.4 4 billion in net outflows, including a historic $4.5 billion single month in June across a 13-day consecutive outflow streak. And it hasn't stopped. The week of the 10th of August saw a further $390 million leave, the largest weekly outflow