Data & Insights: BTC & Gold See High Correlation; Market Greed?

• Data & Insights is a weekly series showcasing top charts from The Block’s Data Dashboard.
• This week, we’re taking a look at digital asset treasuries and the debasement trade. We’ll also look at the Fear and Greed Index and the revival of Robinhood and Solana.

Looks Good. Send DAT.

• Crypto digital asset treasury companies (DATs) have been among the best-performing crypto equities since the start of the bull trend. 
  • DATs buy and hold cryptocurrencies to raise capital at a premium and use it as leverage to buy more tokens. Investors are willing to buy DAT shares because these companies take leveraged positions in the underlying assets, which should amplify returns.
• Cumulative market capitalization for these companies is up 10% since mid-August and hovers around $340 billion. 
  • Performance has varied across the DATs. Established names like Strategy and Bitminer are up 30% and 27%, respectively, generally in line with the price appreciation of the underlying, with Strategy outperforming BTC by 10% since August 17. 
  • However, new-age DATs with less attention have been some of the best-performing crypto-related assets so far this cycle. Altcoin DATs CYPH and PURR track underlying tokens ZCash and Hype. The tokens have also performed strongly, with HYPE up 36% and ZEC up 56%. PURR and CYPH, on the other hand, have returned 62% and 142%, respectively. 
• Crypto DATs are evolving as these companies expand to different tokens. One of the more interesting propositions is a DAT's ability to participate in an ecosystem. Ethereum DATs stake ETH and help secure the network, PURR runs a Hyperliquid validator to vote in governance, and CYPH operates a mining operation to contribute hashrate to the network. These functions were largely unavailable to Strategy since Bitcoin is an unproductive asset, but they give these DATs a unique value proposition within their blockchains. 
• As these DATs gain traction and push their mNAV to a premium, they enable an accretion flywheel in which issued shares are used to buy more tokens accretively for the holder. 

Debasement Correlation

• Bitcoin’s 90-day Pearson correlation coefficient with Gold reached an all-time high, and the 30-day reached a yearly high of 0.8. The correlation coefficient measures how closely two assets’ prices move together; the higher the figure, the more the prices resemble one another. 
  • This metric is important for BTC. For most of this year, Bitcoin has correlated with gold and equities to the downside, meaning when stocks drop, Bitcoin drops, but when stocks go up, Bitcoin doesn’t perform as well. 
• This recent price appreciation in Bitcoin and gold has been fueled by the debasement narrative. The notion is that the dollar and effectively all government-backed assets will lose value, and investors are looking for shelter in hard assets. Traditionally, this has been gold but has recently expanded to include Bitcoin. Indeed, some macro analysts suggest the US faces a set of challenges that make debasement inevitable. Regardless of how the macro plays out, we welcome Bitcoin's positive price performance. 
  • Both Gold and Bitcoin ETFs have been some of the strongest ETFs, with both ETFs in the top 10 by inflow. This week, Bitcoin ETFs drew in nearly 1 billion in inflows. Despite a few strong weeks of inflows, Bitcoin ETFs are still sitting at 1.89B YTD. However, individual ETFs, including BlackRock's IBIT, are up $1.2B in inflows for the year. 
  • Bitcoin and gold correlation has spiked previously in Q4 2020 and Q4 2022. For Bitcoin, a strong rally followed this spike both times, suggesting an early bull-market indicator. When Bitcoin decorrelates with gold after these spikes is when the bull market truly begins. In 2020, Bitcoin gained 172% after its gold correlation reached 0.6 and subsequently dropped. In Q4 2022, BTC-gold correlation rose from roughly 0 to 0.5. Bitcoin then rallied nearly 350% in the 14 months that followed.

Is this… Greed?

• The Fear and Greed Index measures market sentiment on a 0-100 scale, with 0 being fearful and 100 being greedy. The metric is currently sitting at 68, which is considered greedy, after setting a low of 5 this year in extreme fear. 
  • The index focuses on Bitcoin and aims to capture factors such as volatility, market momentum/volume, social media sentiment, dominance, and trends.
  • While not the most violent shift in sentiment, this move is exceptionally sharp for an asset class the size of Bitcoin. We spent most of 2026 grinding through fear before going vertical between August 17-21. The move ranks as the 4th-largest weekly move, with the index rising more than 10 points a day. 
• Despite a high fear-greed ranking, participants have observed that the market does not feel the same level of volatility or frothiness associated with a market top or blow-off event. 
  • Indeed, 2026 has yet to break any records for Fear-Greed volatility, nor has it come close to the highest-range years. In 2026, the index rose from a low of 5 to a high of 74, a range of 69. This ranks 6th in the past 9 years of history. The largest range belongs to 2019, when the index marked a similar low of 5 and reached an eye-watering high of 95, for a range of 90. 
  • These measures show that despite the strong swing in the Fear and Greed Index, we still have much more room to go if we’re at the start of the bull market.

Best Onchain Euphoria in Years

• Robinhood chain recorded its highest ever single-day DEX volume on Friday, with ~$989 million worth, just shy of the billion-dollar mark.
  • Total value locked (TVL) clocked in at a record ~$708 million, a near 100% MoM increase.
  • Stablecoin supply within the chain also stands at ~$770 million, a 47% MoM increase.
• Alongside the absolute growth, the composition of projects and tokens that have grown in recent weeks, compared to the month prior, has changed.
  • In July, Robinhood chain was dominated by memecoin beta, following the run and eventual Robinhood spot listing of CASHCAT.
  • In August, tokens that have garnered the most attention and volume have been those related to utility and infrastructure.
  • The most notable example is PONS, one of the chain’s most dominant launchpads, whose market cap grew from $20M to over $200M this month alone.
  • The chain’s other dominant launchpad is LONG (long.xyz), which facilitates tokens (mainly memecoins) paired against tokenized stocks, which remain Robinhood Chain’s key differentiator.
  • The largest stock-paired memecoin in the chain was launched from the LONG launchpad, with the ticker AI, short for Artificial Inu, paired against tokenized NVDA.
  • The AI memecoin had grown from a $1.5M market cap on August 1st to a peak of $135M on August 30th, as it now holds over ~$3.3 million of liquidity in its NVDA pool, more than triple the depth of its WETH pool.
  • Memecoins paired against tokenized stocks now account for roughly 1/4th of all stock-linked trading volume on Robinhood chain.
  • Other notable utility-related Robinhood chain projects include Delta, a liquidity layer protocol, alongside UP, a ve(3,3) emissions project similar to Aerodrome on Base, as well as NetNet, an OHM-style bonding project, all of which have 10x’d their valuations in August alone.

Double or Nothing

• Solana's fee generation, denominated in SOL, reached a seven-day average of nearly 9,200 SOL on August 27, over 80% higher than from three months ago.
  • Non-vote transactions also set a record high of 191 million on a seven-day basis, compared to just 88 million a year earlier.
  • Meanwhile, Jito validator tips averaged 2,073 SOL per day over the past week, up 26% WoW, a direct indication of increased onchain activity.
• Meanwhile, SGP-0002, the Double Disinflation proposal, passed on August 28 with 67.001% support against a 66.67% threshold.
  • Turnout reached 60.7% across 1,326 validators, the highest on-chain governance participation in Solana's history.
  • The proposal doubles the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, removing roughly 18.9 million SOL from projected issuance over six years.
  • In simple terms, this means that less new supply of SOL will reach the market every year, which also means validators will earn less for the same amount of work.
  • Staking rewards will fall from ~5.25% to 2.25% by year 3, which squeezes validators who lean on inflation income rather than transaction fees, which means that many validators will likely become unprofitable within the next three years.
  • Though this will likely impact smaller independent operators rather than the largest operators.
  • The average user will likely notice nothing from the passing of this proposal in terms of the speed and fees of the Solana network.