Bitcoin bulls are still around. These charts show they just moved on to hotter markets.

MW Bitcoin bulls are still around. These charts show they just moved on to hotter markets.

By Frances Yue

The same investors that chased cryptocurrencies higher moved on to gold, oil and pre-IPO trades

Bitcoin has lost 30% this year to date.

Traders who once bet on cryptocurrencies have not stopped gambling on the next big market story - they just are not finding that story in crypto itself.

Data from financial research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and crypto derivatives firm Block Scholes show that speculative appetite has migrated across a series of hotter trades this year - from precious metals and oil, to technology stocks and contracts tied to companies that have not yet gone public.

That is the problem now confronting crypto bulls, who have long lived with the "HODL" mantra (short for "hold on for dear life.") The "never sell" narrative pushed by Strategy (MSTR) Executive Chair Michael Saylor, whose company is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin (BTCUSD), was tested last week when Strategy disclosed that it sold a small amount of bitcoin for the first time in nearly four years.

Bitcoin fell 0.2% on Wednesday and has tumbled 15.7% so far in June, according to Dow Jones Market Data. It has plunged 51% from its all-time intraday high of $126,272.76, reached on Oct. 6.

Meanwhile, investors who chased cryptocurrencies when they were hot are still chasing assets showing upside momentum - using leverage to amplify those bets, and looking for markets with big price swings. The difference is that the crypto sector has struggled to produce a fresh story powerful enough to compete with artificial intelligence, war-driven moves in oil (CL00), earlier demand for precious metals or the boom in trading around private companies before they list publicly.

"I think a lot of it has to do with there's just nothing exciting happening in the [crypto] market right now," Hardika Singh, economic strategist at Fundstrat, said in a phone interview. "I think that silence is deafening in a lot of ways for crypto," she added.

Last year, gold (GC00) offered a cleaner expression of several themes that bitcoin bulls had long claimed for the cryptocurrency: protection against fiscal worries, concerns about the dollar losing value and geopolitical stress.

The Iran war then reshuffled the market's favorite trades again. Oil became the more direct way to bet on geopolitical disruption, while artificial intelligence-linked technology stocks offered a clearer growth story and stronger earnings momentum.

The chart below shows the relative performance of various sectors and assets compared to the S&P 500 from February 27, just before the Iran conflict began, through June 9. The S&P 500 was up 6.03% since Feb 27, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Bitcoin has underperformed the S&P 500 SPX by about 13 percentage points since Feb. 27, while ether (ETHUSD) has trailed the benchmark by about 21 percentage points, according to Fundstrat and Bloomberg data. Gold and silver (SI00) have fared even worse, lagging the S&P 500 by about 25 and 37 percentage points, respectively.

By contrast, technology stocks have been among the clearest winners. Even after the recent selloff, technology shares excluding the Magnificent Seven, have outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 28 percentage points since the start of the conflict, while the KOSPI KR:180721 and MSCI World Technology index have also sharply beaten the broader U.S. benchmark, according to the same data.

The shift is also showing up in an unlikely place: Hyperliquid, a crypto-native perpetual-futures exchange where traders can speculate not only on bitcoin and ether, but also on tokenized versions of gold, oil, chip stocks, equity indexes and pre-initial-public-offering companies.

It's no coincidence that the interest in pre-IPO trades comes as SpaceX $(SPCX)$ is expected to go public this week after the biggest IPO in history.

Perpetual futures let traders bet on an asset's price without owning it. They do not expire like regular futures and, on crypto-native venues, they trade around the clock. That makes Hyperliquid a useful window into where crypto-native traders are now directing their attention.

While bitcoin and ether still have much larger trading volumes on Hyperliquid than most other markets, the more telling shift is where activity is growing fastest, shown by the chart below.

At first, there was a shift in attention and capital toward precious metals, said Thahbib Rahman, research analyst at Block Scholes.

Seven-day rolling perpetual-futures volume in gold- and silver-linked contracts on Hyperliquid peaked at $1.78 billion a day on Feb. 5, coinciding with the late-January precious-metals blow-off top, as shown in the chart below, Rahman said. But as spot prices for precious metals fell sharply, activity in those contracts also faded. Volume is now around $140 million a day, down 8.9% over the past 30 days, according to Block Scholes data.

The next rotation was into oil. West Texas Intermediate crude oil-linked (CL.1) perpetual contracts were trading at a value of only about $2 million a day in mid-February, Rahman said. By April 13, as the Middle East conflict gripped markets, that figure had surged to as much as $1.15 billion a day.

More recently, the speculative focus has moved toward chips. A basket of chip-linked perpetuals, including Micron Technology $(MU)$, Marvell Technology $(MRVL)$, Intel $(INTC)$, Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices $(AMD)$, has seen volume rise more than twelvefold, from $36 million a day in late April to $442 million a day as of Wednesday. Thirty-day notional volume was up 307% versus the prior 30 days, according to Rahman.

Another set of data points offers clues about where traders are making bullish bets, not just where they are trading the most.

Pre-IPO perpetuals currently have an average annualized funding rate of about 47.3%, while chip-linked perps have an average funding rate of about 17.1%, according to the Block Scholes data. Positive funding means traders betting on higher prices are paying those betting on lower prices, a sign that demand for bullish exposure is strong.

That contrasts with ether, where funding is negative, suggesting short sellers are willing to pay to maintain bearish positions. Bitcoin funding is modestly positive, but far below the levels seen in the hottest non-crypto-linked buckets, according to Rahman.

-Frances Yue

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June 10, 2026 17:54 ET (21:54 GMT)

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