Why Is Bitcoin Lagging Gold And Silver? Pompliano Explains

Gold and silver have gone on a record-setting tear in recent months, ripping through fresh all-time highs, while Bitcoin has been stuck grinding sideways in a tight $84,000–$94,000 box since mid-November. In a January 27 video posted to X, Anthony Pompliano argued the gap is less about a single catalyst and more about shifting demand drivers, market structure, and a new fight for attention and risk capital.

Pompliano framed the disconnect with blunt scorekeeping. “We have gold, which is up 80% in the last year. Silver’s up 250%, copper’s up 40%, and platinum’s up nearly 200% over the last 12 months,” he said, before turning to the contrast: “At the same exact time, Bitcoin is down 16% over the last year.”

In his telling, the metals aren’t moving as a monolith, they’re responding to different sources of demand. Gold, he said, is benefiting from central banks accumulating reserves and what he described as “a definitization of the global economy,” where flows rotate out of dollars not into other fiat, but into gold.

Silver, by contrast, is less about store-of-value positioning and more about industrial pull. Pompliano pointed to defense equipment, AI hardware, and self-driving cars as examples of end-demand, arguing that “the world is building things again” and that re-industrialization makes silver a direct beneficiary.

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Copper and platinum, in his framework, are even cleaner industrial stories. Copper rides electrification (EVs, grid buildouts, renewables) and “significant industrial demand.” Platinum’s move, he argued, is supply constrained, describing “very, very low supply” that creates a market structure favorable to holders. Pompliano also highlighted what he called a rotation within metals where gold led, then silver, and more recently copper and platinum, a sequence he dubbed “the metals mania.”

So Why Hasn’t Bitcoin Joined The Run?

Pompliano’s first answer was structural: Wall Street’s adoption is changing who holds Bitcoin and how it trades. He described an “IPO moment of Bitcoin,” (referring to Jordy Visser’s theory), where long-term holders have been handing coins off to institutional players.

In Pompliano’s view, some early holders owned Bitcoin precisely because it was “outside the system,” and the asset’s migration into mainstream finance may reduce enthusiasm from that cohort. He also pointed to public comments from Peter Thiel and others suggesting Bitcoin’s future may be less “asymmetric” than its early years.

The second structural shift is the proliferation of financial instruments around BTC. “It used to be really hard to short Bitcoin. Well, now you can do it very simply,” Pompliano said, arguing that options and shorting change the market’s plumbing and dampen volatility. “Bitcoin used to be an 80 vol asset. Now it’s more like a 40 vol asset,” he added, positioning the trade-off as fewer parabolic upside phases but also fewer catastrophic drawdowns.

From there, Pompliano moved to narrative demand — specifically, the idea that Bitcoin had been treated as a “chaos hedge.” He argued that recent perceptions of rising geopolitical stability have reduced the perceived need for that insurance bid, while central banks, with far larger pools of capital, continue to express their hedge preference through gold. “It seems like there is not as much of a bid for Bitcoin coming as this insurance hedge,” he said, stressing he viewed it as a flow and narrative issue rather than a loss of utility.

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He made a similar point about inflation hedging, claiming disinflation has undercut one of Bitcoin’s most effective recent narratives. Citing Trueflation, Pompliano said the metric showed 1.2% inflation, “150 basis points lower than it was just 90 days ago,” and argued that AI and tariffs are deflationary forces. If investors don’t expect inflation to run hot, he reasoned, some capital simply won’t reach BTC.

Finally, he argued Bitcoin is losing mindshare and speculative oxygen to AI and to a broader set of “risk-taking” outlets. “There is simply more competition,” Pompliano said, extending the idea beyond markets into an attention economy where every asset competes when users open a financial app and decide where to allocate leftover cash. In that framing, Bitcoin is no longer the default high-upside wager for younger participants; it’s competing with AI equities, prediction markets, and sports betting.

Pompliano’s closing message was that laggards can catch up and that he sees Bitcoin as “more interesting sitting at $87,000 than it was at $126,000.” But he also cautioned that a lower-volatility, more institutional Bitcoin may demand a different temperament from holders. “If you actually get impatient, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to get shaken out,” he said, arguing that the trade increasingly resembles a waiting game rather than a yearly sprint.

At press time, BTC traded at $88,131.

Bitcoin still trades between the 0.618 and 0.786 Fib, 1-week chart | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView.comFeatured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com