Bitcoin climbed to a multi-month high this week, aided in part by investors fleeing volatility and once again treating the largest cryptocurrency as a safe haven.

From early June, the price had been trapped in a range between $60,000 and $70,000, disappointing investors who still hoped Bitcoin could return to the boom times of October, when it soared above $126,000.

Late last month, Bitcoin finally broke out of that range. On Thursday, it reached a four-month high of $82,262 before paring gains, and by Friday afternoon it was down 2% at roughly $79,800—still near its highest level since May.

In a recent note to clients, André Dragosch, Bitwise’s director of research for Europe, said the cryptocurrency’s recent upswing reflects investors treating it more as a store of value than a risky tech stock.

The shift follows Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent unveiling of a plan to increase Treasury buybacks of long-dated bonds as yields surged. The move raised fears of “financial repression” and came as the 30-year yield hit its highest level in nearly two decades late last month, with the Iran war keeping inflation forecasts elevated.

Amid Bessent’s proposed measure, which has not yet been rolled out, Bitcoin’s 90-day correlation with gold has neared a six-year high, Dragosch wrote in the note. That marks a change from earlier this year, when Bitcoin traded more like a risk-on asset that was more correlated with tech stocks.

“When things get serious and macro forces are strong, investors are discriminating less and less between bitcoin and gold as they navigate rising currency debasement risks,” Dragosch wrote. “In those scenarios, bitcoin has recently started to look like an amplified version of gold.”

Still, this may not be an encouraging sign for the broader market. Dragosch warned that the last time Bitcoin and the dollar were this closely correlated was in 2020, when central banks worldwide responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with stimulus and quantitative easing.

Some traders also argue that Bitcoin’s recent good news could be short-lived, citing the four-year cycle theory, which holds that Bitcoin’s bear market lows and bull market tops tend to occur in four-year increments. According to Fidelity’s fourth quarter crypto market outlook, if the theory holds true, Bitcoin’s next bear market bottom could arrive sometime in November—four years after the last bear market bottom in November 2022.

The four-year cycle theory is partly tied to Bitcoin’s halving process, which cuts the rewards paid to the miners who keep the blockchain underpinning Bitcoin running. Halvings occur roughly every four years, with the most recent one in April 2024, and past halvings have historically been followed by bull runs and subsequent drawdowns—the pattern cycle theorists point to when projecting the sequence of market tops and bottoms.

One of the louder voices advocating the four-year cycle theory is Alex Thorn, Galaxy’s head of firmwide research. In a June report, Thorn wrote that “the historical analogies suggest a base case bottom for the current drawdown between $40k-46k occurring sometime between now and Q4 2026,” while noting that this was not a price prediction.

However, Chris Kuiper, vice president of research at Fidelity Digital Assets, said in the fourth quarter market outlook that the theory does not necessarily imply a downslide later this year, as the timing of the four-year cycle is not exact.

“In light of this, having a long-term perspective and holding period is what has historically been the most beneficial for investors,” Kuiper wrote in the report this week.

For now, market watchers will be watching whether Bitcoin’s correlation with gold holds as the Treasury buyback plan moves toward implementation and as inflation and bond market pressures evolve—signals that could indicate whether the cryptocurrency’s safe-haven behavior persists or fades.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com