Bitcoin rebounds 4% to $78,899 but its 12% weekly drop doubles gold’s 5% decline, extending underperformance since late 2024.
Asian equities and precious metals staged a sharp recovery on Tuesday after their steepest two-day drop since April, but Bitcoin continues to lag in its recovery.
The divergence highlights a persistent trend since late 2025: traditional assets continue to attract capital while crypto struggles to keep pace.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index advanced 2.2%, erasing most of Monday’s losses. South Korea’s KOSPI led the region with a surge of over 5.63%, followed by Japan’s Nikkei 225 at 3.90% and India’s Sensex at 2.70%.
South Korea, which market analysts describe as the world’s best-performing stock index this year, saw its market rebound after plummeting on Monday. Tech shares rallied across the region, with Nasdaq 100 futures also rising after Palantir posted a stronger-than-expected sales outlook.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Shanghai Composite also turned positive, gaining 0.21% and 0.38% respectively, marking a region-wide recovery.
Gold jumped 3.25% to $4,810 an ounce, while silver surged 8% to over $83, clawing back some losses after a record-breaking rally abruptly unwound late last week.
Precious metals surged to record highs last month amid renewed concerns about geopolitical upheaval, currency debasement, and threats to the Federal Reserve’s independence. A wave of buying from Chinese speculators supercharged the rally before it reversed on Friday.
Chinese buyers provided support for the recovery. Over the weekend, buyers flocked to the country’s biggest bullion marketplace in Shenzhen to stock up on gold jewelry and bars ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday starting February 16.
Deutsche Bank maintained its forecast that gold will rally to $6,000 an ounce, while Pepperstone noted that the foundations supporting gold remain largely unchanged since the correction.
Bitcoin rebounded 4% over 24 hours to $78,899, roughly matching gold’s daily gain. However, looking at the weekly picture tells a different story.
Over seven days, Bitcoin has fallen 12.1%, more than double gold’s 5.06% decline over the same period. The leading cryptocurrency dropped from above $92,000 to below $75,000 before recovering to current levels.
This pattern echoes a trend that emerged in late 2025, when Korean retail investors rotated from crypto to equities as the KOSPI hit record highs. At that time, trading volume on Korea’s five major crypto exchanges collapsed by over 80% while the stock market surged 71.8% year-to-date.
The divergence suggests that while crypto is participating in the broader risk-asset recovery, it continues to underperform traditional assets in both magnitude of gains and speed of recovery.
Analysts remain cautious about calling a bottom. Some warn that catching the falling knife remains risky and that traders should stay alert to the risk of a dead-cat bounce, while others characterize the commodity price action as more about a positioning shakeout of leveraged hands than a change in the fundamental story, calling it a market to watch for vulnerabilities and extremes.
For Bitcoin, the key question is whether it can close the performance gap with traditional assets, or whether the pattern of relative underperformance will persist, as it has since late 2024.
