Bitcoin outperforms gold and oil in first days of US-Israel war

Four days into the onset of the US-Israeli war with Iran, bitcoin (BTC) has outperformed many major asset classes, including commodities that were supposed to shine in exactly this scenario.

Since Donald Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury’s opening airstrikes at 1:15am New York time on February 28, BTC has surged 12.1% from $65,492 to $73,419 at time of writing.

Crude oil, the one asset with an obviously bullish wartime supply reduction, gained a less impressive 10.4% from $67.29 to $74.31 per barrel.

Gold has actually dropped 3% since the onset of war despite an initial safe-haven spike.

Silver entirely retraced a brief spike on war fears and is now down 10.2% after a rollercoaster ride alongside gold and other precious metals.

Easy to beat, the S&P 500 Index flatlined at -0.1%.

A weekend of relative strength amid a bad year

Nvidia, the artificial intelligence (AI) darling that once moved markets by itself and gained signed assurance from the Pentagon that OpenAI would continue to generate plenty of demand for its chips, managed to rally a modest 2.8%. 

Even adjusting that 2.8% by 3.1x to account for Nvidia’s larger-than-BTC market cap, it still underperformed the world’s largest crypto by 340 basis points.

The disappointment from precious metals holders is evident. As the US military made obvious movements across the Atlantic into the Gulf states last week, gold and silver steadily ticked higher in textbook fashion — then spent the next three days bleeding out as the dollar strengthened and inflation fears displaced geopolitical hedging.

While BTC investors gained, owners of non-digital hard monies over the last week watched an initial pop turn into a net loss.

Of course, the numbers above are since the proper onset of war. Year-to-date figures are distinct.

Over this longer time frame, BTC has lost 16% while gold has rallied 18%. As usual, there are two sides to every story.

An even better weekend performer than oil

Although the outperformance of BTC raises eyebrows, crude oil’s gain makes intuitive sense. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint near Iran through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil transits daily. 

Tanker vessel traffic through the strait dropped roughly 81% since the war began, as insurers pulled war risk coverage and shippers avoided the strait for legitimate fears of human life. 

Tanker rates in the area hit all-time highs. Brent initially spiked 13% to $82 before settling a bit lower. Barclays analysts warned of $100 per barrel if the blockade holds, though the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus announced 206,000 barrels per day in additional output to soften the supply crunch.

Still, BTC outperformed oil during the year’s biggest war.

Read more: CHART: Bitcoin has lost all of its gains since Trump’s election

AI agrees: BTC is the trade

Interestingly, a recent study has highlighted a new macro tailwind for BTC that could drive demand in 2026.

Researchers published results from 9,072 experiments across 36 frontier AI models and found that AI agents chose BTC 48% of the time when selecting an optimal monetary asset.

For store-of-value use cases specifically, 79% picked BTC. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, one of the world’s most-used models, chose BTC 91% of the time.

Conventional wisdom was that war favors gold, oil, and the dollar. Four days of live data say otherwise. BTC absorbed the initial shock, recovered faster than many traditional safe havens, and now tops leaderboards of trillion-dollar assets since the early morning hours of Saturday.

Whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens next week or next year, this was the week BTC became an interesting crisis asset performer.

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