Jan Van Eck, CEO of Van Eck Associates, suggested that Bitcoin (BTC) investors have moved to gold during an interview with CNBC published on Jan. 26.

Van Eck declared that he thinks “that Bitcoin pulled a bit of demand away from gold last year, in 2017.” Afterward, he concluded:

“Interestingly, we just polled 4,000 Bitcoin investors and their number one investment for 2019 is actually gold. So gold lost to Bitcoin and now it's going the other way.”

During the same interview while talking about Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), Tim Seymour, founder and chief investment officer of Seymour Asset Management, declared that Bitcoin’s function as a store of value is questionable:

“Not only have we lost all liquidity on the underlying [commodity] but truly outside of the existential blockchain argument, it's been very difficult to argue store of value which is really what we started hearing about. Gold is a store of value and there's no disputing that.”

Van Eck’s firm created what CNBC defined as the most well known gold ETFs, namely the GDX gold miners ETF and the GDXJ junior gold miners ETF. Van Eck declared that those assets “have been acting tremendously well over the last two or three months” before underlining that they seemingly do the opposite of what stock markets do.

“In the majority of the days in Q4 when the S&P was down, GDX was up,” he said, before concluding “that decoupling makes me really excited about gold shares as a diversifier." Furthermore, according to CNBC, the GDX ETF grew by 14 percent in the fourth quarter, which according to the article is its best performance since Q2 2016. Moreover, the GDX is up under 1 percent this year, as the S&P 500 grew 6 percent.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s (CBOE) BZX Equity Exchange has withdrawn its request for a rule change by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The requested change was meant to permit the listing of the ETF backed by VanEck and financial services company SolidX.

At the end of last year, Bitcoin’s (BTC) average daily price change was the lowest value reported in the past nine years, Cointelegraph reported.