Bitcoin price tops $70,000 as Brent jumps past $100 on Gulf strikes

Bitcoin rebounded above $70,000 on March 12 while oil prices climbed after three cargo tankers were struck in the Gulf, an incident that pressured shipping near the Strait of Hormuz and pushed energy costs higher amid conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran.

In early Asian trading, Brent crude reached $101.47 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate touched an intraday high of $95.91. On March 11, Bitcoin price slipped to $69.5K after U.S. CPI met forecasts, but has since recovered to around $70,500, up about 1.9% over the past 24 hours.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply, making disruptions there a key driver of price swings. Jonathan Farnell, CEO of crypto brokerage Freedx, called a potential International Energy Agency stockpile release “a band-aid,” arguing it would not fully offset lost flows. He described the chokepoint as “functionally paralyzed,” with major shippers rerouting around Africa and extending transit times and costs.

Higher oil is feeding concerns about inflation and interest rates. Interest-rate futures put the probability of the Federal Reserve holding policy steady at its next meeting at 99.3%. The U.S. dollar index traded just below 100. With crude above $100, Farnell expects Bitcoin’s path of least resistance to be sideways to lower through the end of March.

Since fighting escalated on February 28, Bitcoin has outpaced traditional havens and equities, rising more than 8% while gold is down about 2% and the Nasdaq-100 is off roughly 0.5%. Rachel Lin, CEO of SynFutures, noted that crypto often trades like a risk asset during liquidity squeezes but can draw renewed demand when geopolitical stress persists. “The first-order effect is risk-off volatility, but the second-order effect can be renewed structural demand for censorship-resistant financial assets,” she said.

Crypto traders have been expressing views on oil in decentralized markets. Oil-linked perpetual futures on Hyperliquid processed about $991 million in volume over the past 24 hours, reflecting demand for round-the-clock exposure to macro shocks.

Prediction markets highlighted uncertainty around the Gulf. Users on Myriad assigned a 63.3% chance that oil’s next significant move is a rally to $120, and were evenly split on Bitcoin’s near-term path, placing a 50% probability on a move to $84,000 and a 50% probability on a drop to $55,000.

Longer-dated projections still assume lower equilibrium prices once supply normalizes. Goldman Sachs raised its fourth-quarter 2026 oil targets to $71 for Brent and $67 for WTI, up from $66 and $62, while flagging elevated near-term volatility.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan wrote that Bitcoin could reach $1 million per coin if it captured a much larger share of the store-of-value market he pegged just under $38 trillion, including about $36 trillion in gold and $1.4 trillion in BTC. He cited rapid ETF adoption, easing long-term volatility, and growing institutional participation.