The cryptocurrency sector remains deeply out of favor, not only from a price perspective, but also in terms of investor sentiment.
Capital flows and market attention have increasingly shifted to other high-growth sectors, most recently semiconductors and memory-related stocks, which have effectively replaced cryptocurrencies as the market’s dominant trading momentum.
This analysis compares the performance cycles of bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization; gold, the greatest precious metal; NVIDIA (NVDA), the leading AI-powered stock; and memory and semiconductor names, including SanDisk (SNDK) and Micron Technology (MU).
Bitcoin saw a huge rally from its November 2022 low to its October 2025 high, rising over 650%, from around $15,000 to nearly $125,000. A major part of that movement occurred between September 2024 and January 2025, when the price doubled from approximately $55,000 to $110,000 in conjunction with Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024. The price finally surpassed $126,000 last October.
Gold followed a delayed but similar trajectory, driven largely by the growing “debasement trade” narrative around fiscal deficits and monetary expansion. The metal began its breakout in early 2024 near $2,000 per ounce and eventually rose above $5,200 per ounce in February 2026, about four months after bitcoin peaked. Since then, gold has corrected almost 20% and is now trading below $4,400 an ounce.
NVIDIA followed a similar pattern, reaching a high near $225 per share in May before falling back to $212, and is now only slightly higher over the past six months.
The hot money trade has now shifted decisively toward memory and semiconductor companies like Sandisk and Micron Technology, with Micron recently entering the trillion-dollar market cap club after having a valuation of just $70 billion just a year ago.
With SpaceX potentially approaching the largest IPO in history, and OpenAI and Anthropic possibly soon to follow, investor attention could shift once again. Like the cryptocurrency, gold and AI infrastructures that preceded them, these companies could become the next major destination for speculative and momentum-driven capital, potentially defining the next phase of the market cycle.
Now that investors are about to get a shiny new object to shower attention and money on, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies could be sidelined by bull runs for much longer than expected.
