Bitcoin’s digital gold status will be proven by who holds it under sanctions, not by its price chart, according to Bitwise derivatives head Gordon Grant. He sees sanctioned states quietly accumulating Bitcoin the way Iran once used gold.
Grant debated the thesis with Theo CIO Iggy Ioppe on BeInCrypto’s Market Intelligence Experts Council. Ioppe countered that Bitcoin (BTC) has failed every short-term hedge test this year. However, both agreed on where the long-term story stands.
Gold Was Never the Safe Haven Investors Remember
In a BeInCrypto’s experts panel, Grant began by dismantling the standard defense of gold itself. The metal fell during the 2008 financial crisis. Its secular uptrend only began around 2010.
In his view, a macro hedge is not an asset guaranteed to rise in a crash. Instead, it is one whose correlation with other large assets falls as systemic stress rises. Grant calls this conditional decoupling. Resilience and hedgeability matter more than performance.
That definition changes the question for Bitcoin. The asset no longer needs to rally through a crash to earn its digital gold label. It needs to loosen its tie to equities when conditions get hostile.
The Decoupling Test Bitcoin Is Quietly Passing
Grant argues that the process may already be underway, despite Bitcoin’s tight link to Nasdaq equities in recent years.
“Micron sold off 30%. Bitcoin didn’t do anything. MicroStrategy itself sold off a huge amount and Bitcoin is actually higher than it was when MicroStrategy was considerably higher. So, I’m not yet ready to give up on the digital gold like correlative decoupling characteristics of Bitcoin,” Gordon Grant, PM and head of derivatives at Bitwise
The evidence is current. Strategy recently fell below $100 for the first time since March 2024 and made its first Bitcoin sale in years. Meanwhile, BTC trades near $60,347, up 1.24% in 24 hours, with a $1.21 trillion market cap.
The data deserves honest framing. The 200-day correlation with the S&P 500 has retreated from near-record highs in 2025 toward zero. Similar dips appeared in 2015, 2018, and 2021. Therefore, the chart supports Grant’s thesis without yet proving a permanent break.
Why Sanctions are the Real Bitcoin Digital Gold Test
The stronger pillar of Grant’s argument sits away from price entirely. He watches who appears to be accumulating.
“There’s an increasing set of cohorts amidst the BRICS countries that seem like they’re holding some Bitcoin… Iran, Russia, Venezuela, maybe the UAE, maybe Saudi Arabia, we don’t know… maybe some countries in the Far East, maybe China, Kazakhstan,” Gordon Grant, Bitwise
History supplies the template. Turkish-Iranian trader Reza Zarrab, arrested in Miami in 2016, revealed how Iran moved money worldwide through gold under the strictest US sanctions. Grant sees the same logic migrating to bitcoin, and Iran already treats crypto as an economic lifeline today.
“That’s how gold has been used, right? It’s been the thing that people go back to when nothing else works. Even if the price volatility is high, they know they can get their hands on it, they can move it, it’s liquid, and it’s hedgeable,” Gordon Grant, Bitwise
Disclosed sovereign holdings cannot capture this demand. Public trackers show seized coins dominating, led by the US reserve of roughly 328,000 BTC. Sanctioned states publish nothing. Their accumulation surfaces only through mining, where VanEck counts up to 13 government programs.
Russia Turned the Theory Into Official Policy
What Grant frames as inference became law weeks before the debate. Russia legalized bitcoin and stablecoin payments in foreign trade on July 1, explicitly to bypass Western banking sanctions.
The EU responded within weeks. Its latest package targeted 11 crypto platforms tied to Russia and tightened exchange checks. In contrast to 2022, when sanctions pushed states toward gold, the workaround now runs partly through bitcoin rails.
Sanctions Revived Gold After a 12-Year Dead Zone
The precedent for sanctions-driven demand is not theoretical. Gold did almost nothing from 2011 to 2023 despite trillions in quantitative easing. Ioppe argues the freeze of Russia’s reserves in February 2022 changed that.
Other central banks watched and drew conclusions. Ioppe described their reasoning as “just in case” insurance against their own future confrontations.
Historically, that buying wave lifted quarterly central bank purchases to roughly double the prior decade’s pace, World Gold Council data shows.
Bitcoin Digital Gold: The Counterweight From the Buy Side
Ioppe, a former Credit Suisse proprietary trading head, refused to let the thesis run unchallenged. His test is simpler and harsher.
“Bitcoin is down almost 50%. So it definitely hasn’t worked,” Iggy Ioppe, CIO at Theo
His framework explains why both views can hold. Bitcoin layers a speculative element and a tech element on top of a monetary base. The speculative layer dominates in crises, while the base asserts itself over the years.
“That foundation… prevails over long-term disruptions, but in the near term the speculative aspect prevails,” Iggy Ioppe, Theo
Where does that leave the debate? Grant notes Bitcoin stays hedgeable through deep derivatives markets regardless of price direction. Ioppe still calls it digital gold for investment purposes.
The correlation chart remains ambiguous, yet the sanctions bid is now written into national law. The test Grant describes is no longer hypothetical.