Gold's share of global central bank reserves reached 26.6% in 2025, the highest reading in 32 years, according to a Cointelegraph report circulated on May 29, 2026. The previous time central banks held this much of their reserves in bullion, the World Wide Web had been public for less than two years and the euro did not yet exist.
The figure matters because it ends a long argument about whether central bank gold buying was a cyclical trade or a structural reweighting. A one-year jump can be dismissed as opportunistic. A multi-year climb back to the share last seen in 1993 is a different signal.
A long retreat reversed
Through the late 1990s and 2000s, central banks were net sellers of gold. European central banks ran formal sale agreements. Reserve managers preferred dollars and treasuries, which paid yield and traded in liquid global markets. Gold's share of total reserves drifted lower for two decades.
That trend snapped after 2008 and accelerated again after 2022. Emerging market central banks, especially in China, Turkey, India, Poland, and across the Gulf, began adding bullion at a pace not seen since the Bretton Woods era. The 26.6% reading captures the cumulative effect of those purchases compounding against a flatter dollar reserve base.
The Bitcoin debate gets harder, not easier
Bitcoin holders have spent the last decade arguing that BTC would eventually take a slice of central bank reserves. The pitch was straightforward: if reserve managers want a politically neutral, non-confiscatable asset that no single government can debase, Bitcoin is the only digital option that fits.
The gold number cuts both ways for that thesis. On one hand, it proves the appetite for a neutral reserve asset is real and growing. Reserve managers are voting with their balance sheets, and they are voting against the dollar's monopoly. On the other hand, they are voting for the asset they already know. Gold's 26.6% share was built one ton at a time over a decade, using infrastructure (refiners, vaulting, audit, transport) that has existed for centuries.
Bitcoin's spot price sits at $73,463 as of May 29, 2026, down 5.06% over the past week according to CoinMarketCap. The Fear and Greed index reads 33 (Fear). That is not the macro backdrop in which a conservative reserve manager defends a first Bitcoin allocation to a parliamentary committee.
The signal for stablecoin reserve assets too
There is a second-order angle that often gets missed. Stablecoin issuers are themselves a class of reserve manager. Tether and Circle together hold over a hundred billion dollars in short-duration treasuries and have at various points disclosed gold and Bitcoin allocations. As central banks raise their gold weighting, the political case for stablecoins to follow becomes easier to make.
That ties directly to recent regulatory developments. The Treasury's recent reaffirmation of an anti-CBDC stance and pro-stablecoin posture implicitly delegates part of the dollar's reserve-asset job to private issuers. If those issuers want their dollar to be trusted alongside a gold-weighted central bank balance sheet, they will eventually need to look like one.
The macro read
Foreign holders of US treasuries have been quietly thinning their exposure. Holdings in Federal Reserve custody slipped to $2.68 trillion earlier this month, the lowest reading in over a year. Same trend, different ledger entry.
For crypto markets, the most direct read is on Bitcoin's correlation with gold. When gold rallies on reserve-manager demand and Bitcoin sells off on liquidity stress, the "digital gold" framing weakens in the short term. When the two assets move together, the framing strengthens. The next quarter of gold prints will tell which regime we are in.
For US-based crypto users, the practical takeaway is more modest. None of this changes how a US crypto card settles tomorrow's coffee purchase. It does change the long-run case for holding part of net worth in a non-sovereign asset, whether that asset is bullion sitting in a vault in Switzerland or BTC sitting in a wallet you control.
Overview
Central bank gold reserves reached 26.6% of total reserves in 2025, the highest share since 1993. The print confirms a multi-year structural shift away from dollar dominance. For crypto, the implication is mixed: the appetite for a neutral reserve asset is real, but central banks have so far chosen the asset they already trust. Bitcoin's reserve-asset thesis remains a long-duration trade, not a 2026 catalyst.
