Bitcoin has passed a key stress test amid oil volatility

Tom Lee says bitcoin’s surge amid oil surges linked to Middle East tensions suggests the asset has passed a key stress test.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee said Bitcoin has come under severe scrutiny after rallying over the weekend as oil prices rose due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

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

Assumptions have been cleared

Speaking to CNBC’s Scott Wapner on the sidelines of the Future Proof conference in Miami, Lee noted that the crypto market has already passed the bear market.

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

He also said he expects markets to close in positive territory in March, possibly reaching 5,300 on the S&P 500 by the end of the year. However, he cautioned that a 20% drop could occur at some point, possibly when markets fail to respond to the good news.

On Bitcoin specifically, Lee was direct. When pressed by Wapner on whether the OG cryptocurrency has failed as a safe haven given that gold has dominated the recent period of market stress, Lee acknowledged the weakness but described it as a product of extreme conditions.

“Bitcoin literally crashed on October 10th because it was the biggest disruptive event in crypto history,” he said. “When Gold went up, Bitcoin went down.”

But according to him, this is all in the past. “We’ve had a winter where a lot of speculation and leverage has gone away,” he said, pointing to the weekend’s price action as a turning point, with BTC holding up as oil prices surged as the Strait of Hormuz closed.

“This weekend showed that Bitcoin is coming back into vogue as a store of value,” Lee said, noting that BTC was above $70,000 even as oil rallied aggressively.

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Where is Bitcoin now?

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading around $70,000, after only briefly reaching $71,600, per CoinGecko data, down 0.2% in the last 24 hours. It’s up about 3% over the past week and about 7% over the past two weeks, though it’s down about 12% for the year and is down more than 44% since October 2025.

The picture from on-chain data is mixed, and Binance Research analysis shows that around 29,000 BTC were taken from exchanges while the price was sold in the range of $65,000 to $75,000, this pattern contrasts with previous sales of $92,000 to $62,000 when the exchange balance increased.