Bitcoin already sets all-time high against the US dollar index

US dollars might technically be worth less, but it’s still good news

article-image

Mc_Cloud/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

share

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


You might know that the US dollar has been pummeled this year. 

The DXY index — which prices the greenback against a basket of currencies — is down 12% since mid-January, practically erasing all of its gains over the past five years.

Granted, DXY has its problems. It’s heavily skewed toward the dollar’s exchange rate in Europe, with more than half of its weight assigned to the euro, as well as 20% or so spread unevenly across the British pound, Swedish krona and Swiss franc. 

The Japanese yen is the only featured currency from Asia, with about 14%. The renminbi is excluded altogether, and the US dollar is down only about 2.5% against the yuan since mid-January.

The orange line is BTC/USD, the purple line is BTC/USD adjusted for DXY’s volatility starting one year ago, and the blue line is DXY.

As you can see, this quickly gets messy. Bitcoin is up almost 12% in the past six months, while the DXY is down by almost the same percentage. Does that mean bitcoin is about even?

Well, whether it’s over five years, three or one, BTC/USD is vastly outperforming major assets and benchmarks. 

Bitcoin (priced in US dollars) is beating crude oil, gold, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. 

Not shown: bitcoin trailing Nvidia stock over the three-year and five-year horizons.

Let’s instead see the price of bitcoin, denominated in each of those majors. It’s similar to how we’d measure the price of ETH in BTC terms with the ETH/BTC ratio.

Bitcoin’s ratio with the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and crude oil topped out in late May, and we’re still just shy of all three.

That’s in line with bitcoin’s current standing against the US dollar (in raw dollar terms, not DXY), only 2% short of a new price record.

Luckily, there are many different kinds of all-time highs.

The gold/bitcoin ratio, however, is almost 20% below its all-time high from a week before Christmas 2024.

But what would this newsletter be without something to celebrate?

When bitcoin hit $110,500 earlier this morning, on Coinbase, that was actually an all-time high against DXY — 1139.58 — around 2% higher than the previous peak in late May. 

A minor victory, considering the DXY’s flaws. But a win is a win.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday

article-image

The government says Storm was a money-hungry aid to criminals; the defense says it’s not his fault that people used his code for illicit activities.

article-image

EigenLayer, Lido and Taiko are buying verifiable compute

article-image

Sam Altman sees our future through the World Orb

article-image

Few US politicians are this clearheaded about Bitcoin

article-image

Pump.fun seemed to kick off buybacks on Tuesday according to onchain analysis