Bitcoin surged 12% from February 27 to April 10, 2026, as U.S.-Iran tensions peaked. The S&P 500 slipped 1%. Gold plunged 10%. Yahoo Finance captured Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan’s take: this wasn’t random. Chaos favors Bitcoin.
Hougan’s April memo lays it out plain. Bitcoin holds two promises. First, it grabs share from gold’s $20 trillion hoard—scarce, government-free, but slow and bulky. Bitcoin matches scarcity with 21 million coins max. It zips borders. No banks needed. Second—and bolder—Bitcoin turns into a neutral rail for trade shunned by Swift. That’s the dollar system’s chokehold.
Iran tested it. An oil export rep proposed a $1-per-barrel Bitcoin toll for Strait of Hormuz ships, per DL News. Ships carry 20% of world oil. Pay up, or park. Bitcoin? Portable. Unfreezable. Hougan calls this an “out-of-the-money call option” activating now. “If bitcoin starts to take on a dual role as both a store of value (like gold) and an actual currency (like the dollar), we may need to revise our targets higher,” he wrote, as quoted in Bitcoin.com News.
De-Dollarization Accelerates in Real Time
Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion previewed the shift. Yuan in Russian trade jumped from under 2% to 40% by 2024. Russia-China deals? 99% rubles and yuan. No dollars. Swift sanctions forced it. Iran faces the same. Bitcoin fills the gap—no single power pulls strings.
Hougan pegs Bitcoin at under 4% of the store-of-value pie. Gold’s at $20-34 trillion, per X posts echoing Bitwise analysis. Capture 17%? One million dollars per coin. That’s no wild guess. Institutional flows held during the flare-up. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw steady inflows, defying stress, notes AInvest.
But. Gold faltered. Why? Physical hassles in panic. Bitcoin traded fine. Miners adapted too. Bitdeer hit 70 EH/s self-mining in March, producing 661 BTC—up 480% year-over-year—despite energy jitters, per The Block. Iran accounts for 4.5% of global hash rate. Conflict risks power grabs. Yet the network hummed.
X buzz amplified it. Matt Hougan posted April 16: Bitcoin benefits from Iran strife, per his CoinDesk chat. Posts from @BitcoinArchive tallied the mismatch: BTC +12%, gold -10%, S&P -1% since late February. “Chaos is a ladder,” Hougan and research head Ryan Rasmussen wrote in their client note.
Geopolitics isn’t pausing. Strait blockades loom. Oil spikes threaten inflation. Fed cuts? On hold. Bitcoin’s edge sharpens. Neutral money for fractured alliances. Russia stockpiles. Iran experiments. China watches.
Path to $1 Million: Dual Role Unlocks Bigger Markets
Hougan’s math stacks up. Store-of-value alone eyes $1 million at 17% share. Add settlement utility? Addressable market dwarfs gold. “Bitcoin’s addressable market could eventually surpass gold’s,” he argues. Recent rally proves it—not risk-on froth, but demand from system cracks.
Skeptics point to correlation slips. Oil and BTC linked at 0.68 during peaks, per X analyst @AJCrypto15. Liquidity squeezes hurt. Ceasefire could unwind safe-haven bids. Fair. But data diverges. BlackRock bought through the noise. MicroStrategy added $1 billion.
Bitcoin held $65,000-$73,000 amid war, outperforming stocks as oil spiked, says AOL. Bhutan sold holdings, but that’s outlier noise. Network resilience stands. Miners scale. Institutions pile in.
So where next? Hougan revises higher if dual role sticks. War accelerated it. Dollar fractures widen. Bitcoin? Ready. Not just digital gold. Global settlement in waiting.
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