Bitcoin Passed Key Stress Test Amid Oil Volatility

Tom Lee says Bitcoin’s rally during an oil surge tied to Middle East tensions shows the asset passed a key stress test.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee has said that Bitcoin passed a major test after it rallied over the weekend while oil prices surged due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

According to him, the price action was a sign that the massive deleveraging from last October is finally behind the market, allowing Bitcoin to re-emerge as a credible store of value.

The Speculation Has Been Cleared Out

Lee was speaking to CNBC’s Scott Wapner on the sidelines of the Future Proof conference in Miami, where he pointed out that the crypto market had already been through its bear market.

“We had a bear market already in software, the Mag-7 and in crypto,” he said. “I think that’s already taken out a lot of speculation.”

He also said he expects markets to close March in positive territory and potentially reach 5,300 on the S&P 500 later in the year. However, he warned that there might be a 20% decline at some point, which would likely be when markets stop responding to good news.

On Bitcoin specifically, Lee was direct. When pressed by Wapner on whether the OG cryptocurrency had failed as a safe haven, given that gold outperformed during the most recent stretch of market stress, Lee acknowledged the weakness but framed it as a product of extreme conditions.

“Bitcoin basically broke on October 10 because that was the biggest deleveraging event in the history of crypto,” he said. “When gold went up, Bitcoin went down.”

But according to him, that’s all in the past. “We have gone through a winter where a lot of the speculation and the leverage is gone,” he said, pointing to the weekend’s price action as a turning point, with BTC holding up in the face of oil prices climbing sharply when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.

“This weekend kind of showed Bitcoin is coming back in vogue as a store of value,” Lee said, noting that BTC held above $70,000 even as oil moved aggressively higher.

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Where Bitcoin Stands Now

As of the time of this writing, Bitcoin was trading at around $70,000, only dropping 0.2% in the last 24 hours after briefly touching $71,600 per CoinGecko data. Over the past week, it is up about 3% and up nearly 7% across two weeks, although it remains down around 12% year-on-year and sits more than 44% below its October 2025 all-time high.

The picture from on-chain data is mixed, with Binance Research analysis showing approximately 29,000 BTC have been withdrawn from exchanges while the price traded in the $65,000 to $75,000 range, a pattern that contrasts with an earlier sell-off from $92,000 to $62,000 when exchange balances were rising.