Gold and silver have been on a record-breaking tear in recent months, breaking new all-time highs, while Bitcoin has been stuck sideways in a tight box of $84,000-$94,000 since mid-November. In a video posted to
Pompliano framed the disconnect with blunt scoring. “We have gold, which is up 80% in the last year. Silver is up 250%, copper is up 40% and platinum is up almost 200% in the last twelve months,” he said, before turning to contrast: “At the exact same time, Bitcoin is down 16% in the last year.”
According to him, the metals do not move as a monolith, but respond to different sources of demand. Gold, he said, benefits from central banks accumulating reserves and from what he described as “a definition of the global economy,” with dollar flows rotating not to other fiat but to gold.
Silver, on the other hand, is less about store-of-value positioning and more about industrial appeal. Pompliano cited defense equipment, AI hardware and self-driving cars as examples of the end demand, arguing that “the world is building things again” and that reindustrialization makes silver a direct beneficiary.
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Copper and platinum are even cleaner industrial stories in his framework. Copper leverages electrification (EVs, grid construction, renewables) and “significant industrial demand.” Platinum’s move, he argued, is a supply constraint, which describes “very, very low supply,” creating a market structure that favors holders. Pompliano also highlighted what he called a rotation within metals, leading to gold, then silver, and more recently copper and platinum, a sequence he called “the metal mania.”
So why hasn’t Bitcoin joined the run?
Pompliano’s first answer was structural: Wall Street’s adoption changes who owns Bitcoin and how it is traded. He described a “Bitcoin IPO moment” (referring to Jordy Visser’s theory), where long-term holders have distributed coins to institutional players.
According to Pompliano, some early holders owned Bitcoin precisely because it was “outside the system,” and the asset’s migration to mainstream financial markets could dampen that cohort’s enthusiasm. He also pointed to public comments from Peter Thiel and others suggesting that Bitcoin’s future might be less “asymmetric” than its early years.
The second structural shift is the proliferation of financial instruments around BTC. “It used to be very difficult to short Bitcoin. Well, now you can do it very easily,” Pompliano said, arguing that options and shorting change the plumbing of the market and dampen volatility. “Bitcoin used to be an 80-vol asset. Now it’s more of a 40-vol asset,” he added, positioning the trade-off as less parabolic upside phases, but also less catastrophic pullbacks.
From there, Pompliano turned to the narrative question – specifically the idea that Bitcoin was being treated as a “chaos hedge.” He argued that the recent perception of increasing geopolitical stability has reduced the perceived need for that insurance bid, while central banks, with much larger capital pools, continue to express their hedging preference through gold. “It doesn’t seem like there’s going to be as big a bid for Bitcoin as this insurance hedge,” he said, emphasizing that he saw 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 that disinflation has undermined one of Bitcoin’s most effective recent narratives. Citing Trueflation, Pompliano said the measure showed inflation of 1.2%, “150 basis points lower than just 90 days ago,” and argued that AI and tariffs are deflationary forces. If investors don’t expect inflation to run high, he reasoned, some of the capital will simply not reach BTC.
Finally, he argued that Bitcoin is losing mindshare and speculative oxygen to AI and to a broader set of “risk-taking” outlets. “There’s just more competition,” Pompliano said, expanding the idea beyond markets to an attention economy in which every asset competes with each other as users open a financial app and decide where to allocate their leftover money. In that context, Bitcoin is no longer the standard high stakes for younger participants; it competes with AI stocks, prediction markets and sports betting.
Why is Bitcoin lagging while gold, silver, copper and platinum continue to rise?
I analyze the forces driving the metals rally, how Wall Street adoption has reshaped Bitcoin’s market structure, and why inflation expectations, global stability, and AI are impacting… pic.twitter.com/VzATl6ZCYi
— Anthony Pompliano 🌪 (@APompliano) January 27, 2026
Pompliano’s closing message was that laggards can catch up and that he sees Bitcoin as “more interesting at $87,000 than at $126,000.” But he also warned that a more institutional Bitcoin with lower volatility may require a different temperament from holders. “If you get really impatient, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to be shocked,” he said, arguing that the trade is increasingly looking more like a waiting game than an annual sprint.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $88,131.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com