#夏日创作营 Trump’s Iran Threat: Oil Prices Break $100—How Will This War Affect Bitcoin and Stablecoins?

The war hasn’t yet received the final order, but oil prices, freight costs, stablecoins, and Bitcoin have already started taking notes.

On July 23, the Houthis claimed they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. The two vessels caught fire, and there were no reports of casualties for the time being. Trump later said that if similar attacks happen again, the United States would hold Iran responsible and impose “major military penalties” on Iran and the Houthis.

That same day, Brent crude closed at $100.69 per barrel, up about 7% on the day—by far the clearest asset price reaction since the event.

U.S. stock markets were also under pressure at the same time: the S&P 500 fell 1.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2%.

Trump also told Axios that he is considering a “large-scale attack” against Iran, but has not made a final decision. Strictly speaking, this is not a new war order, but a conditional military threat.

For the market, however, whether missiles take off has to wait for confirmation from the military—while the risk premium does not.

After the tankers caught fire, ship owners calculate the costs of rerouting, insurers adjust their rates, traders prepare more cash, and fund managers reassess inflation and interest rates. The war is still only in the news feed, but the bill has already entered everyone’s balance sheet. This is not an ordinary current-affairs story about policy—it’s an asset story. It affects not just oil, shipping, U.S. Treasuries, and inflation, but also drags back into reality the Web3 narratives that the industry has discussed for years: whether Bitcoin is truly digital gold, whether RWA can handle real-world assets, and whether stablecoins are speculative chips or financial infrastructure.

1. Day one tests liquidity; one month later tests “digital gold”
Based on intraday publicly available prices, BTC was about $66,077 at 00:00 UTC on July 23, then fell to about $64,914 at 16:00 UTC, and returned to about $65,033 at 00:00 UTC on July 24. The first stage after the news hit the market looked more like a roughly 1.6% pullback in risk assets; afterwards it stabilized, which is not enough to prove “digital gold” has already exited its independent trend.

The Bitcoin community has told a story for many years: that BTC can become digital gold. Its total supply is limited and not issued by any single country. It can be transferred globally, so it should be able to take on the value-storing function during wars, inflation, and declining monetary credit.

The biggest problem with this story is that reality often doesn’t set the questions like the whitepaper. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out in 2022, Bitcoin didn’t behave like gold—it behaved more like an all-weather trading instrument with higher leverage, like a technology stock. When U.S. stocks fell, it fell too; when dollar liquidity tightened, it dropped faster. When the market needs cash, it doesn’t debate Satoshi’s monetary philosophy first—it sells the most sellable asset with the longest trading time. BTC happens to fit that condition. But Bitcoin in 2026 is no longer Bitcoin in 2022. Spot ETFs have already brought it into the traditional financial system. However, ETFs make it easier for institutions to buy, and also easier for them to sell during risk events. Bitcoin has gained a seat in mainstream asset portfolios, and therefore has been written into mainstream institutions’ risk-control models.

If oil prices remain above $100, what the market worries about first won’t be Web3 narratives—it will be inflation rising again.

High oil prices may prolong high interest rates, pushing up the dollar and U.S. Treasury yields. High-volatility assets will face valuation pressure. Even with a fixed BTC supply, it can’t escape this chain of macro transmission.

So a single candlestick is not enough to judge whether “digital gold” exists. Day one tests liquidity; a week later tests repair ability. If the conflict continues for a month—or longer—the test becomes whether it can absorb demand from capital controls, native-currency depreciation, and safe-haven allocations. If oil rises, Nasdaq faces pressure, and BTC gradually exits a relatively independent range, then “digital gold” can claim some real-world support. Conversely, if every military escalation turns it back into a high-leverage tech stock, then the label is still just the best marketing copy for a bull market. 2026 isn’t its graduation ceremony—it’s its strictest retake so far.

Observation window: liquidity on day one, repair ability after a week, and only after a month does it earn the right to discuss safe-haven attributes.

2. War isn’t an ad for oil RWA—it’s a stress test.
After oil breaks $100, the Web3 industry can easily spin another story: as oil prices rise, commodities draw attention, and therefore oil RWA will get an opportunity—every barrel of crude oil in the future can be tokenized. This narrative sounds complete, but the biggest flaw is that it thinks oil is too much like Bitcoin. One Bitcoin has no quality difference across Beijing, New York, and Dubai. But one barrel of crude oil has origins, density, sulfur content, delivery dates, and transport routes.

Even if on-chain tokens represent a barrel of real oil, someone still has to be responsible for storage, quality inspection, insurance, and delivery. Blockchains can transfer title evidence, but they can’t turn a tanker stuck outside the strait into a ship at the port; they can shorten settlement time, but they can’t shorten the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

What has the best chance of going on-chain first isn’t the oil itself, but the ring of financial rights around it: letters of credit, warehouse receipts, insurance policies, trade finance, and accounts receivable.

If blockchain helps the market confirm cargo ownership faster and release accounts receivable financing earlier, it can indeed reduce documentation, verification, and settlement frictions—but it cannot reduce the physical risks created by war. The more realistic, and darker, applications happen in a sanctions environment.

In 2025, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned a network involving individuals and companies in Iran, Hong Kong, and the UAE, accusing it of helping process cryptocurrency funds worth more than $100 million originating from Iranian oil sales. This shows that crypto assets have entered the real capital pipeline of part of the oil trade. But first it is a shadow financial network of sanctions and counter-sanctions; only second does it become the efficient global market that the RWA industry imagines.

One sentence: what goes on-chain first isn’t oil, but the warehouse receipts, accounts receivable, insurance documents, and settlement rights around oil.

3. Stablecoins aren’t a shelter—but they might be a temporary floating bridge.
If BTC carries the asset narrative and RWA carries the trade narrative, then stablecoins face a more concrete survival problem. After the Red Sea route is blocked, more ships may reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. That adds not only another line on the map, but also more fuel, insurance, crew wages, inventory cycles, and capital lock-up. Large multinational corporations can digest these costs with inventories and credit lines, but smaller traders don’t have such a thick buffer. If a batch of goods arrives two weeks late, it may mean the customer delays payment; delayed payments from customers may then mean the next batch of goods can’t be purchased. In the end, war doesn’t appear on their books under the name of “geopolitical risk”—it becomes a late payment, a penalty interest charge, or a broken cash flow.

Traditional cross-border settlement exposes weaknesses easily in this environment. Banks have business hours, remittances go through correspondent banks, and sensitive-region transactions face longer compliance reviews. Traders may not trust decentralization; they just need a dollar channel that can transfer on weekends and confirm receipt within minutes.

Stablecoin on-chain supply can be aggregated directly, but “supply changes” do not equal “cross-border usage,” and they do not equal “war-related capital flows.”

DefiLlama’s snapshots of USDT circulating supply aggregated by contracts across each chain show that on July 22 it was about $184.16B, on July 23 about $184.12B. On the event day it decreased by about $43.5 million, a very small change. By July 24 the endpoint was about $183.04B, but that day hadn’t ended yet—an incomplete snapshot—so you can’t declare that there were billion-dollar-scale redemptions. To judge whether funds moved from exchanges to self-custody wallets, you also need address labels and exchange net flow data.

After the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, crypto trading volume in related markets increased. The Ukrainian government and civil society organizations also received BTC, ETH, and stablecoin donations through public addresses. Users may not care whether the coin price will rise next week; what they care about is whether relatives can transfer money in after bank branches shut, and whether rescue organizations can buy medicines and equipment in time.

But stablecoins are not a financial refuge that never closes. USDT and USDC run on public chains, but the minting power is held by centralized companies. Issuers can freeze addresses, exchanges can restrict accounts, and on-chain analytics firms can trace capital flows. Stablecoins can bypass bank business hours, but they can’t naturally bypass the sanctions regime.

Here lies the most real contradiction in Web3. Ordinary families may use stablecoins to preserve purchasing power; small and mid-sized merchants may use them to pay for goods; sanctioned organizations may also use them to settle oil or procure supplies. Code can record where a transfer came from and where it went, but it won’t automatically tell us what was bought—food, oil, drone parts, or plane tickets for a family leaving the war zone. Stablecoins have not eliminated power in traditional finance—they’ve just rearranged where the power sits.

The bank counter disappears, but issuers, exchanges, and on-chain analytics companies stand behind a new counter. It’s not an island fully detached from the state; it’s more like a temporary floating bridge set up on the wartime sea. Many people need it to cross the river, but whether the bridge is open—and who gets through—still depends on decisions made by others.

4. The traditional world and the on-chain world are keeping two different sets of books
This conflict is generating two ledgers at the same time. Traditional finance records oil prices, military spending, shipping insurance, inflation, fiscal deficits, and corporate profits. The on-chain world records wallet migrations, sanctioned addresses, perpetual contract liquidations, prediction market probabilities, and BTC’s risk expression when traditional markets are closed.

Traditional ledgers often take months or even years before telling the public what happened, through government budgets, corporate financial reports, and congressional hearings.

On-chain ledgers can leave traces of capital movement within minutes. But seeing transfers doesn’t mean you understand the war. Blockchains can prove which addresses a piece of money passed through, but they can’t explain whether it bought food or weapons.

Rising oil prices don’t mean oil RWA wins. More capital controls don’t mean stablecoins enter a bull market. Military upgrades don’t automatically mean BTC becomes digital gold.

Writing someone else’s war into your own investment opportunity can definitely get attention—but it’s too easy. The real test Web3 faces isn’t whether it can create a new narrative from the war. It’s whether it can provide a still-usable channel for capital when traditional systems fail—and whether it can admit that sanctions, freezing, and power issues exist within that channel.

In 2021, the Web3 industry liked to call blockchain a safe-haven asset, as if simply writing assets on-chain would automatically free them from the influence of states, banks, and war.

The 2022 bear market made that fantasy look ugly: BTC would fall with U.S. stocks, DeFi would undergo concentrated liquidations, stablecoins would de-peg, and cross-chain bridges might be emptied by hackers.

The 2026 Iran-U.S. conflict gave this proposition a chance to be retested. What needs to be tested isn’t how much ETH went up, isn’t which public chain has higher TPS, and isn’t which DeFi protocol rode the war to create a beautiful TVL curve. The real thing being tested is whether on-chain finance can provide a still-usable capital channel when shipping lanes are blocked, oil breaks $100, bank reviews slow down, and the local currency continues to depreciate.

Web3 has not made war decentralized. It has only made a portion of the capital flows in war move faster, become more public, and be easier to trade.

On July 23, two oil tankers caught fire in the Red Sea. Traditional markets recorded oil prices, freight costs, insurance premiums, and inflation; the on-chain world recorded wallet migrations, stablecoin transfers, leverage liquidations, and capital fleeing. War creates a lot of bills. Some people send them to the gas station, some to the supermarket, some into fund NAVs, and some write them into a block that won’t disappear easily.

After oil breaks $100, of course someone will record this entry. The real question is: who explains this bill, and finally who pays for it.