Bitcoin near $65,000 as Iran orders Strait of Hormuz closed

Bitcoin traded near $65,000 Monday after recovering from a Friday drop below $63,000, following Iran’s weekend order to close the Strait of Hormuz. The closure revived oil-supply concerns connected to ceasefire talks held in Switzerland and coincided with shifting signals from U.S. policy makers.

Bitcoin gained modestly from the Friday low and finished roughly flat for the week. Ether hovered near $1,750 and Solana around $73. Prices remained above the low $60,000s but below the highs seen earlier in the week.

Ceasefire talks in Switzerland initially eased oil-market fears and pushed crude lower, but Iran’s weekend order to close the Strait of Hormuz reversed some of that decline. Oil traded near $77 a barrel on Monday. Equities and gold moved little and U.S. stock futures were largely unchanged from late last week.

U.S. Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded about $227 million in net outflows last week and roughly $6.35 billion over the past 30 days. Ether ETFs posted modest outflows. Strategy’s preferred stock tied to bitcoin buying, STRC, fell to an intraday record low of $83 on Thursday before recovering into the high $80s.

CME Group filed suit against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, asking a court to vacate the agency’s approval of perpetual futures cleared in the U.S. The exchange argues those perpetual contracts should be classified as swaps under Dodd-Frank rather than futures, which would subject them to different regulatory requirements. The litigation challenges approvals granted to platforms including Kalshi and Coinbase.

Franklin Templeton filed for an ETF structure that would reinvest U.S. stock dividends into bitcoin rather than pay them out in cash. Federal regulators proposed rules requiring stablecoin issuers to verify customer identities.

Market surveillance followed a decentralized finance incident on Ethereum in which an automated trading bot was exploited for more than $7.5 million after an attacker induced it to approve spoofed trading routes and drained WETH, USDC and USDT.

Perpetual futures, often called ‘perps,’ are derivative contracts without a fixed expiration date that use funding payments between longs and shorts to track an asset’s price. The classification dispute between exchanges and regulators concerns how those contracts should be offered and cleared in the U.S.