Crypto Price News: Despite the Crash, Fundamentals Are Still Bullish

Nearly $2 trillion has evaporated from the crypto market in around four and a half months, resulting in a 47% loss for those who bought at the peak.

In retrospect, the latest crypto crash was triggered by President Donald Trump’s decision to hike tariffs on China after negotiations stalled.

Cryptocurrency Liquidations – Source: CoinGlass

A tsunami of liquidations on October 10 was the spark that caused a massive risk-off move that evaporated more than $16 billion worth of long positions in just a few hours, followed by a subsequent wave of selling that has resulted in severe losses for the entire sector.

As a result, the famous phrase “Bitcoin is dead” has been uttered multiple times in the past few months. In February alone, Bitcoin Deaths, a website that tracks how many times Bitcoin is declared deceased, has counted 9 different headlines with this bold statement.

Blockchain Tech’s Use Cases Under Scrutiny?

Truth is, this is not the first time that cryptocurrencies have crashed to this extent.

That said, at a point when institutional adoption is at its peak, Bitcoin’s reputation is as solid as it gets, and DeFi is no longer a concept reserved for underground Reddit forums – has blockchain technology failed to deliver on its promises?

What explains such a dramatic crypto crash when you have the President of the United States supporting the sector’s growth and favorable legislation being pushed forward in Congress?

The answer to this question will determine if this crash is a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity or a strong signal that the golden era of cryptos could be over.

In the next few paragraphs, we will analyze the following key trends:

• Exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
• Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
• Gold vs. Bitcoin.
• Correlation between cryptos and other markets.
• Are cryptos still a good investment in 2026?

Crypto ETF Inflows Hit $47 Billion Last Year

Last year, a flood of crypto-linked exchange-traded funds (ETFs) made it to Wall Street. Both retail and institutional investors now have access to regulated products through which they can buy not just Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) but also more exotic altcoins like Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC), and Chainlink (LINK).

Total Assets and Cumulative Flows Crypto ETPs – Source: CoinShares

The latest data from CoinShares shows that the total assets under management (AUM) held by all exchange-traded products (ETPs) across the globe stood at $132 billion by the end of last week, down from a peak of around $260 billion back in October 2025.

Although investors have pulled out $1.3 billion from these vehicles in 2026, they deposited a total of $47.2 billion into ETPs.

Wall Street’s appetite for cryptos remains strong, no matter how low prices have gone.

Tokenized Real-World Assets Market Keeps Booming

Although cryptos are down, institutions are increasingly embracing blockchain technology to launch tokenized assets covering a growing number of financial instruments.

This market has kept growing despite the latest wave of negative momentum, as data from RWA.xyz indicates.

Total Market Value of RWAs – Source: RWA.xyz

This website shows that the combined market value of RWAs has jumped from $21.2 billion by the end of last year to $24.9 billion at the time of writing, resulting in a 17% jump in less than two months.

Tokenized gold like Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’s PAXG now account for 19% of the RWA market, followed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, offering on-chain access to U.S. Treasury bonds.

These products are robust case studies of how tokenization is more than a theoretical use case for blockchain tech.

Gold vs. Bitcoin – A Big Divergence

Bitcoin has often been pitched as “digital gold,” but this narrative broke last year as the performance of these two assets, under the same market conditions, diverged significantly.

In 2025, gold delivered a 65% gain at a point when macroeconomic conditions were uncertain due to President Trump’s increasingly hostile trade policies.

This is what you would expect from a “safe haven” asset, but it wasn’t what Bitcoin delivered. Instead, the top crypto ended the year down by 6% as cascade liquidations plunged the price of the token.

BTC/USD – XAU/USD Daily Charts – Source: TradingView

A 71% performance gap indicates that the market is not buying this “digital gold” narrative at all. When put under stress, the crypto market does not seem to be mature enough to absorb big macroeconomic shocks. Although retail might believe so, wealthy investors and institutions still don’t see Bitcoin as a potential inflation or macro hedge.

This breakdown between the two assets has spilled over to 2026, as gold is up 16% while BTC has dropped by 23%.

Cryptos and Other Assets – An Uncorrelated Bet

Despite how the mainstream media pitches it, what investors expect from Bitcoin is not exactly what they expect from gold.

Gold is a scarce precious metal that has built a reputation over centuries as the ultimate store of value.

Bitcoin is just getting started. It was born just 17 years ago, and the technology that backs it is disruptive, but most investors have no idea how it works or whether it is safe.

Hence, Bitcoin’s disconnection with gold’s performance is understandable – and not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact, BTC also performed quite differently from stocks last year.

While a handful of commentators increasingly pointed out that Bitcoin’s moves were increasingly mimicking those of tech stocks, last year proved them wrong.

BTC/USD – Nasdaq 100 Daily Charts – Source: TradingView

While the Nasdaq 100 went up by 20%, BTC shed 6%. Same as gold, that narrative spilled over to 2026, as this tech-heavy index has lost 2% while BTC has retreated by 23%.

The “uncorrelated asset” held up last year under challenging macroeconomic circumstances. In previous years, some of these assets behaved similarly when conditions were either extremely negative or extremely positive.

Lately, when uncertainty reigns, and the state of the economy and the market’s outlook is subject to interpretation, BTC behaved exactly as you would expect – as its own thing.

Wrapping Up: Are Cryptos Still a Good Investment in 2026?

We have taken a closer look throughout this article at the narratives that once helped push the market value of different crypto projects, not just Bitcoin, to billions of dollars over the years.

The latest crash has rattled the markets. Sentiment is at “extreme panic” levels, traders’ interest in cryptos has waned, and pessimistic headlines are all over the place.

However, hard data shows that bullish narratives are still holding strong.

Investors are piling into ETFs to get in, tokenization is booming and highly successful case studies now exist, and Bitcoin seems to be acting as “its own thing” and not as a more volatile gold-linked derivative.

Bitcoin is not gold. That has never been its vision, and will hardly be what it ends up becoming in the future.

Blockchain technology has demonstrated its resilience throughout many market downturns, and rather than this being the end of an era, it seems more like the start of a brand new stage of increased institutional and mainstream adoption.