Early this morning, U.S. forces aired airstrikes on Iran's Lalak Island. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard immediately launched missiles at U.S. bases.
War has arrived.
But the market reaction is quite interesting—
Crude oil prices surged. WTI briefly broke through $85, Brent returned to $90, both rising more than 2%.
Gold opened lower. Spot gold gapped up and opened lower. Not rising, it's falling.
Bitcoin plunged. It dropped to a low of $77,000. It dropped 1.7% in the past hour. Ethereum fell below $2,400. Across the network, about $180 million was liquidated in one hour, with long positions accounting for 173 million.
One piece of news, three types of assets, three different strategies.
Crude oil prices are rising because the Strait of Hormuz is the route for shipping one-third of the world's oil by sea. The US military is targeting Iranian rocket launchers—the Revolutionary Guard is preparing to blockade the strait with mines. The supply disruption is real. Oil prices must rise.
Gold fell because the market was trading on another thing: interest rate hikes.
Federal Reserve Chair Wash just made a statement last Friday—if inflation does not come down, the Fed "still has work to do." The market's expectation for a rate hike in September has soared to 57%.
Geopolitical conflicts → oil prices have risen→ intensified inflation expectations→ heightened rate hike forecasts→ real interest rates have risen→ gold has fallen.
The pricing power of gold lies with interest rates, not with war.
Bitcoin fell because it followed Nasdaq, not gold.
U.S. stock futures fell across the board. Nasdaq 100 index futures fell 0.28%. BTC fell in tandem.
This is not risk aversion. This is a valuation kill for risk assets.
I know some people might say: Didn't the Grayscale report say BTC's correlation with gold rose above 50%, and its correlation with the Nasdaq dropped to 33%?
That was the 90-day statistics window.
Today is an immediate response.
In the first hour of the conflict, BTC followed Nasdaq futures, not gold spot.
Why? Because pricing power is not in geopolitics' hands, but in dollar liquidity. When rate hike expectations tighten, risk assets are the first to kneel.
BTC is a risk asset, not digital gold.
I'm not making this up. After six geopolitical crisis tests, data has never confirmed the narrative of "digital gold." From October 2025 to January 2026, gold rose 39.6% while Bitcoin fell 30.4%. During the Iran conflict, it repeatedly acted as a high-beta risk asset.
Stop trading current BTC within the framework of "digital gold."
The same war:
Crude oil is trading with supply interruptions. Gold is trading with real interest rates. BTC is trading with liquidity expectations.
Understanding the differentiation among assets means understanding the real market narrative.
$BTC$XAU$BZ #美伊军事对抗升级, crude oil supply risks are heating up
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