Is Bitcoin The New ‘Big Tech’ Stock?

Bitcoin used to be an outsider in the financial markets — unpredictable, uncorrelated and immune to Wall Street’s mood swings.

But lately? Bitcoin is moving like a tech stock — rising with the Nasdaq, falling when risk is off.

From April 1 to April 8, as President Donald Trump announced new tariffs, Bitcoin plunged from $85,487 to $76,198. That drop, nearly 11 percent in a week, came alongside sharp declines in mega-cap tech stocks. Apple (AAPL) fell about 23 percent. Nvidia (NVDA) dropped almost 11 percent. Tesla (TSLA) slid more than 14 percent.

Fast-forward to May 23. After stocks rallied to a dizzying V-shaped recovery, Bitcoin notched a new all-time high of $111,970 on May 22.

It’s the latest example of an emerging pattern.

Since the 2020 pandemic crash, Bitcoin’s price behavior has undergone a major shift. Once pitched as “digital gold,” Bitcoin now tends to swing in sync with stocks, especially the tech-heavy indexes.

“In 2025, Bitcoin is no longer a purely speculative asset — it’s part of the institutional financial system,” says Christopher Gannatti, global head of research at WisdomTree. “Bitcoin is increasingly being judged not just by its ideology, but by its integration: How well it fits into a modern global portfolio.”

Bitcoin and Big Tech are increasingly in lock-step since COVID

Before the pandemic, Bitcoin’s daily price moves had little in common with traditional financial markets. Between 2017 and 2019, its correlation with the S&P 500 hovered near zero, according to an analysis by the International Monetary Fund. Bitcoin didn’t move with equities, didn’t track commodities and didn’t behave like bonds.

That supported the theory that Bitcoin was a diversification tool or a hedge. Of course, back then, few investors had heard of Bitcoin, much less held it in their portfolios.

Then came March 2020.

As markets crashed and central banks hit the panic button with massive stimulus packages, Bitcoin’s link with equities emerged.

Analysts in one recent study by FTSE Russell found its correlation with U.S. tech stocks grew to 0.52 post-COVID, a sixfold increase. That’s a strong relationship. Even riskier debt markets, like high-yield bonds, started moving in tandem with Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, its correlation with gold — supposedly its analog cousin — moved from a negative to a positive but stayed low, at 0.15. Gold has continued to be less risky than Bitcoin, as analysts at J.P. Morgan noted in the company’s mid-year outlook report.

Instead of behaving like a safe haven or hedge, Bitcoin in the post-COVID era is acting like a high-beta tech stock: Volatile, reactive and deeply tied to investor sentiment.

5 reasons why Bitcoin started behaving like a Big Tech stock

1. Stimulus fueled the Bitcoin boom

The COVID-era monetary response flooded markets with cheap money. Rate cuts and trillions in fiscal stimulus lit a fire under everything from stocks to crypto.

Investors, flush with cash and stuck at home, piled into meme stocks, growth stocks and crypto. Bitcoin surged. So did Tesla. So did Ethereum. So did GameStop (GME).

But when inflation spiked in 2022 and the Federal Reserve tightened the belt by raising interest rates, both stocks and Bitcoin fell together.

Investors had the funds to go big during lockdown, and millions chose to bet on Big Tech and Bitcoin.

2. Bitcoin is riding the same hype cycle as tech

Crypto and tech stocks share a common fan base: young, online and full of FOMO.

J.P. Morgan analysts have noted that Bitcoin trades similarly to small-cap tech stocks — both are fueled by retail investors betting on innovation.

“Both Bitcoin and Big Tech appeal to investors with similar risk tolerance and secular conviction in transformative systems — AI for Big Tech and decentralized finance for Bitcoin,” says Gannatti.

Crypto and big tech are both fueled by narrative. That helps explain why Bitcoin and the Nasdaq often peak — and plunge — together. They’re riding the same wave of investor expectations.

3. Institutional money is changing how Bitcoin moves

Bitcoin’s rise from niche experiment to institutional asset also helped change the game. Hedge funds, asset managers and even pension funds began allocating capital to Bitcoin in 2022, and that trend continues to the present.

That created overlap between fiat-based financial systems and crypto.

“Passive strategies, algorithmic trading and cross-asset portfolio models often bundle them together as ‘innovation beta’ or macro-levered growth proxies,” says Gannatti.

The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024 only blurred the lines between traditional finance and cryptocurrency further. Investors no longer need to fuss with crypto wallets or exchanges — they can buy Bitcoin like a stock, even in their IRA, which opens the door to a broader audience.

It didn’t take long for investors to pile into Bitcoin ETFs. More than a dozen new funds drew $36 billion in capital in 2024 alone, pushing total assets north of $110 billion.

“This makes Bitcoin more sensitive to macro conditions — liquidity, rates and geopolitical stress — but also more influenced by traditional investor behavior, including rotations and rebalancing,” says Gannatti.

4. Regulation isn’t a roadblock anymore

Policy momentum is also pushing Bitcoin further into the mainstream. One of the clearest examples is Trump’s return to the White House. He’s the first pro-Bitcoin president, and a second Trump term is expected to create a friendlier regulatory environment.

It’s a stunning turnaround. Bitcoin was launched in 2009 as a decentralized alternative to the traditional financial system in the wake of the Great Recession. Its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, likely never envisioned it gaining legitimacy under the leadership of a U.S. president.

The new administration is already dialing back anti-crypto policies, starting with the SEC’s repeal of SAB 121. That change lets banks hold Bitcoin and other digital assets, potentially unlocking a flood of institutional money and pulling Bitcoin deeper into regulated markets.

On the global stage, Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is opening the doors to institutional players.

5. When fear hits, Bitcoin runs too

The “digital gold” narrative hasn’t held up under stress. During the March 2020 crash, Bitcoin lost half its value in just a few days. Investors wanted dollars, not digital coins.

“Bitcoin’s not reliable as a short-term hedge against equity drawdowns,” says Gannatti. “During market stress, Bitcoin often behaves like a risk asset, not a safe haven.”

That held true recently, too. When Trump’s tariff announcement triggered a global flight to safety, gold rallied while both the Nasdaq and Bitcoin dropped double digits. Capital flowed out of speculative assets and into traditional hedges, like gold. Bitcoin — and tech stocks — didn’t recover until later.

Bitcoin isn’t the only asset to change its behavior over time

Bitcoin’s transformation isn’t unique. The behavior of assets can — and does — change when the macroeconomic backdrop shifts.

Perhaps one of the best examples is dot-com era tech stocks.

In the 1990s, early internet companies were wildly speculative — overly optimistic valuations, zero profits and unpredictable swings. The bubble burst in March 2000. The Nasdaq lost 77 percent of its value over the next two years, wiping out many of the over-hyped internet companies that never turned a profit.

But over time, the survivors matured into fundamentally sound businesses, such as Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL). As valuation models improved, so did pricing stability.

Bitcoin might be on a similar path.

”Bitcoin has repeatedly shown that it is here for the long term,” says Joan Nix, an economics professor at Queens College in New York. “As greater institutional adoption occurs and liquidity increases in the crypto world, Bitcoin is in a good position to emerge as a winner, like Amazon and eBay did after the tech boom bust in the late 1990s.”

Experts still struggle to value Bitcoin

Part of the confusion around Bitcoin’s behavior is that nobody quite knows how to value it — or even how to categorize it. Is it a currency? A commodity? A decentralized tech protocol?

Unlike stocks, Bitcoin doesn’t produce cash flow. Unlike bonds, it doesn’t pay interest. And unlike commodities, its utility is purely digital. That makes traditional valuation models mostly useless.

Some researchers have tried tweaking existing frameworks to help retail investors gauge Bitcoin’s value. But none of these frameworks fully explain its behavior.

Some asset managers now use a “mosaic” approach — blending models based on adoption curves, network effects and even energy consumption (like hash rate). Still, none of them work perfectly, making it even more difficult to predict what the price of Bitcoin might do next.

“While Bitcoin trades as a risky asset, the jury is still out on whether traditional asset pricing

models can adequately account for its volatility,” says Nix.

Will Bitcoin continue behaving like a Big Tech stock?

Some analysts think the high correlation between Bitcoin and tech stocks is here to stay. As long as it’s treated as a risk asset by institutional players, Bitcoin will likely continue moving with the broader market.

If that’s the case, retail investors may be wise to pay more attention to external drivers impacting tech stocks — such as interest rates and inflation — and give less credence to crypto-specific catalysts, like halving cycles, regulatory developments and network upgrades.

But others argue the correlation might be morphing.

In 2025, Bitcoin’s price still moves in sync with Big Tech sometimes, but they’re not rising and falling for the same reasons anymore, says Gannatti.

When the overall market is in a “risk-on” mood — meaning investors feel confident and are willing to take more risks — Bitcoin and tech stocks tend to move together.

“But when equity markets rotate based on sector earnings, Bitcoin often decouples,” says Gannatti.

What’s happening in 2025 shows how the market has evolved. Big Tech’s gains are mostly about profits. Bitcoin’s gains are more about investor beliefs and how much money is sloshing around in the system.

“While short bursts of correlation may still appear, Bitcoin’s narrative is becoming more distinct,” says Gannatti.

So maybe Bitcoin hasn’t fully surrendered its unique identity — but it’s still more entangled with global finance than ever before. That’s why experts like Nix caution investors against treating Bitcoin as anything but volatile.

”At this stage in its evolution, where there is little consensus over what crypto-specific drivers will explain its long-term performance, it’s a speculative risk asset,” says Nix. “Retail investors should be careful about allocating anything but a small percentage of their retirement portfolios to it.”

Checking in with a financial advisor can be a good move, too.

Bottom line

For now, Bitcoin is acting like a high-volatility, high-beta tech stock. It rises when investors’ risk appetite is high and falls when macroeconomic headwinds reemerge. Since 2020, its correlation with stocks has spiked and its behavior has shifted from “digital gold” to “digital Nasdaq.”

But that might not last forever. Similar to how tech stocks evolved from dot-com chaos to blue-chip companies, Bitcoin could chart its own path. Its unique traits — fixed supply, decentralized design, long-term bullish investors — could put Bitcoin back into a class of its own as the market matures.

For now, though, anyone treating Bitcoin as a hedge or safe haven is likely to be disappointed. It tends to ride the same roller coaster as Big Tech — and it’s not showing signs of stepping off anytime soon.

Editorial Disclaimer: All investors are advised to conduct their own independent research into investment strategies before making an investment decision. In addition, investors are advised that past investment product performance is no guarantee of future price appreciation.