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Oil shock!

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by Coinbits
Friday, Mar 13, 2026 - 18:56

The fiat financial and geopolitical system is showing strain. War in the Middle East has disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil past $100 a barrel and forcing a reserve dump, which sent prices back down. Worldwide, countries are rationing energy like it’s 1973.

Meanwhile, the private credit mess we flagged last week is accelerating. Five of the largest private credit funds in the world have now halted, restricted, or gated investor redemptions. Blue Owl permanently shut down withdrawals. Blackstone faced a record $3.7 billion in redemption requests. Morgan Stanley returned less than half of what investors asked for. The gates are closing, and billions in capital are trapped behind them.

But there is a bright spot, and it’s a big one. Bitcoin and AI are converging in ways that could reshape commerce entirely. As Matt Corallo wrote this week, bitcoin has a golden opportunity to become the payment rail for AI agents — open, permissionless, and free from corporate gatekeepers.

As written in Forbes this week, “the protocols being deployed right now, in the spring of 2026, will enable the agentic economy the same way that HTTP enabled the web.”

Kazakhstan's central bank to channel $350 million of reserves into bitcoin and digital asset investments

The National Bank of Kazakhstan plans to allocate up to $350 million from its gold and foreign exchange reserves toward investments tied to digital assets, including shares of technology firms involved in bitcoin infrastructure and index funds tracking bitcoin-related markets. The program is expected to begin in April.

The sovereign bitcoin stack grows

Kazakhstan emerged as a global bitcoin mining powerhouse after China's ban of mining in 2021, and now its central bank is putting national reserves to work in the sector. As VanEck's Matthew Sigel noted this week, a dozen sovereign governments are now mining bitcoin. The race to accumulate is no longer theoretical.

Governments ration energy as oil tops $100, reminding the world why censorship-resistant money matters

Oil surged past $100 per barrel this week as the Strait of Hormuz crisis intensified, prompting governments worldwide to impose emergency energy measures. Denmark urged citizens to stop driving, Thailand mandated work-from-home for government employees, and the Philippines cut to a four-day work week. The IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels from reserves — the largest coordinated drawdown on record.

When governments start telling you when to drive and when to stay home…

When the state controls the money and the energy, it controls your life. These are large “non-authoritarian” democracies rationing movement in real time. Bitcoin operates on a network that no government can shut down, ration, or gate. It settles globally, 24/7, regardless of what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz.

Congress debates bitcoin de minimis tax exemption as Coinbase accused of lobbying for stablecoins-only treatment

The Bitcoin Policy Institute revealed that momentum on Capitol Hill has shifted toward limiting a de minimis tax exemption to stablecoins only, excluding bitcoin. BPI has met with 19 congressional offices pushing back. Meanwhile, prominent bitcoiner Marty Bent reported that Coinbase is allegedly telling lawmakers that "no one is using bitcoin as money," prompting sharp denials from Coinbase's CPO and CEO – and a pointed demand for clarity from Jack Dorsey.

The battle for bitcoin as everyday money

This fight matters more than most realize. Without a de minimis exemption, every time you buy coffee with bitcoin, you owe the IRS a capital gains calculation. That's an absurd friction that stifles bitcoin's use as a medium of exchange. Lightning Network data tells the real story: $1.17 billion in monthly volume across 5.22 million transactions. Bitcoin is money. The tax code just hasn't caught up – and some would prefer it stays that way.

FDIC chief confirms stablecoins will get no deposit insurance under GENIUS Act rules

FDIC Chairman Travis Hill confirmed that stablecoins will not receive any form of deposit insurance, including pass-through insurance, under the GENIUS Act. Hill said the prohibition aligns with the law's intent to distinguish stablecoins from bank deposits. He also suggested that tokenized bank deposits should remain eligible for FDIC insurance.

Bearer beats deposit every time

Stablecoins backed 1:1 by reserves shouldn't need FDIC insurance in the first place. That backstop exists because banks lend out depositor funds under fractional reserve. A fully reserved stablecoin doesn't carry the same risk.

But bitcoin goes further. It requires no reserves, no issuer, and no custodian. It is a true digital bearer instrument. You hold it, you own it – there is simply nobody else involved.

What $100 oil means for the bitcoin network

Research from Luxor's Hashrate Index found that only 8% to 10% of global bitcoin hashrate operates in electricity markets linked to crude oil prices, primarily in Gulf states like the UAE and Oman. The firm argues that geopolitical shocks pushing oil above $100 are more likely to impact mining through bitcoin's price than through electricity costs.

Resilience by design

This is bitcoin's distributed security model working exactly as intended. While the global economy convulses over a single chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz, 90% of bitcoin's network runs on energy sources like natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and coal, which aren't tethered to crude. The network doesn't depend on any single geography, any single energy source, or any single government's permission to operate. Distributed by design, resilient by default.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

St. Cloud Credit Union, managing $425 million in assets, launched a "digital asset vault" allowing customers to securely custody their bitcoin holdings.

Nigel Farage acquired a 6.3% stake in bitcoin treasury company Stack BTC for £215,000, pledging to make the UK a global hub for the bitcoin industry and calling for a bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England.

Utexo raised $7.5 million in a seed round co-led by Tether to build bitcoin-native USDT settlement infrastructure, enabling instant stablecoin payments over the Lightning Network.

Binance Research reports that the 12 months following U.S. midterm elections have historically produced an average 54% rise in bitcoin, with 2026 midterms potentially setting up the strongest window in the cycle.

VanEck's Matthew Sigel told CNBC that "there's a dozen countries mining bitcoin at the government level" and expects sovereign mining to proliferate further.

Options traders are increasingly betting on bitcoin reclaiming $80,000, with derivatives pricing implying a 35% probability of surpassing that level by June despite ongoing geopolitical uncertainty.

Metaplanet launched two new subsidiaries — a $25 million venture capital arm to fund Japan's bitcoin ecosystem and a Miami-based asset management firm focused on bitcoin investment products.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

Learn one key idea about bitcoin each week. This week:

Clarifying the digital gold narrative.

Over the past year, bitcoin’s dollar exchange rate has dropped significantly from its $120,000 highs while gold ripped to record after record. Predictably, the “hot takes” from traditional financial pundits arrived: "digital gold" is dead, the thesis is broken, bitcoin failed the test.

This analysis is lazy.

Bitcoin and gold operate in completely different markets with different demand drivers. Gold is experiencing a structural bid from central banks in the Global South and East, many of whom are actively de-dollarizing their reserves. Gold is also an industrial metal with surging demand driven by global turmoil and supply chain disruptions. And it has commanded a monetary premium for over 5,000 years. It has deep, liquid markets and multi-generational trust.

Bitcoin is a completely new monetary primitive. It grew from nothing to a top-ten asset by global market capitalization in barely over a decade. Its demand profile is different also – it has strong retail adoption globally, and institutional and sovereign demand is only just beginning. Many market participants still treat it as a risk asset because they haven't yet understood what it is. It therefore experiences strong selling pressure when hedge fund PMs and asset managers are told to reduce risk when global uncertainty rises. That might seem like a bug but it also means the repricing of bitcoin as a true risk off asset hasn't happened yet. And that means that it is almost always mispriced.

The "digital gold" comparison is useful when comparing properties: both are scarce, require no counterparty when held directly, and cannot be debased. Bitcoin is better on portability, scarcity, divisibility, verifiability, and supply transparency. But sharing monetary properties does not mean sharing price movements. Gold can rip for reasons that have nothing to do with bitcoin.

The emergence of bitcoin-and-gold structured investment products acknowledges this. The assets are complementary, not identical. Bitcoin doesn't need to track gold to validate its thesis. It just needs to keep being the best technology for storing and transferring value ever invented.

COIN CHECK

What was the original purpose of HTTP status code 402, recently revived by bitcoin's Lightning Network for AI agent payments?

A. "Server Unavailable"
B. "Payment Required"
C. "Authentication Needed"
D. "Resource Forbidden"

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

Follow us on X for more fresh content

ANSWER

Answer: B. "Payment Required." HTTP 402 was drafted in the early 1990s as a way for servers to request payment before delivering a resource, but was shelved because no digital payment system existed that could settle small amounts cheaply without credit risk. Bitcoin's Lightning Network has finally made it viable, and protocols like L402 now use it to enable AI agents to pay for API calls, compute cycles, and data access in milliseconds with near-zero fees — fulfilling a vision the internet's original architects had over 30 years ago.

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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