Bitcoin Is Now a Safe Haven, Its Proponents Say

Since President Donald Trump began announcing tariffs, we’ve been talking about safe havens — places investors put their money when the world turns chaotic.

As President Donald Trump began announcing tariffs, we’ve been talking about safe havens — places investors put their money when the world turns chaotic.

Usually, that’s U.S. debt, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. But in the immediate wake of that tariff stock market sell-off, investors sold U.S. Treasurys too.

There’s gold, an ancient safe haven, which hit another record high Wednesday — more than $3,350 an ounce.

But now, in 2025, there’s also bitcoin, whose proponents love to tell you will be the future digital gold.

In the last couple years, when the stock market threw a temper tantrum, bitcoin seemed to have an absolute hissy fit. Like back in the summer of 2022, when the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates to fight inflation.

“We had a large … decline in bitcoin associated with a pretty large decline in the Nasdaq,” said Leigh Drogen, chief investment officer at Starkiller Capital, a crypto investment firm.

He said that’s because investors have viewed bitcoin more like a risky tech stock than as an actual currency capable of storing value.

But, in the past few weeks, “we've seen a significant amount of relative strength that bitcoin has shown to other risk assets. It’s been less volatile.”

One bitcoin cost around $84,000 right before those massive April 2 tariffs. And after dipping some, it’s now right back at around $84,000.

Bitcoin true believers say that’s a milestone.

“Bitcoin is a teenager, from a literal perspective,” said Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management. “It's, you know, 14, 15 years old, and it's so it's going from this early start as a risky asset to its eventual adult life as a hedge asset, just like gold.”

Bitcoin backers argue that because it has a limited supply that can’t be tampered with, bitcoin should be immune from, say, the inflationary impacts of tariffs or eroding faith in the U.S. dollar.

Lee Reiners at Duke University is skeptical.

“You could apply that logic to any asset with a fixed supply, right? If that's, you know, if that's your thesis, like, why not, like, why not Beanie Babies or, like, baseball cards or something else?”

Reiners said bitcoin is still far more correlated with risky tech stocks than actual gold, and he worries that embracing crypto as something safer than it actually is could endanger the noncrypto economy.