Bitcoin rises and gold drops as Iran war enters third week

Last Updated on 17 March 2026 by CryptoTips.eu

Bitcoin rose sharply after the war between Iran and the United States entered its third week. The prices of most altcoins are also going up. Meanwhile, oil is still trading around $100 per barrel and gold appears to be falling.

Safe haven

Gold, the ultimate ‘safe haven’ that normally always rises during geopolitical uncertainty, is one of the increasingly larger losers of the conflict. The price of the precious metal fell by 7% since the start of the conflict on February 28.

Bitcoin, which showed a sharp decline over the last five months, bounced back during the conflict and has gained approximately 11% since February 28.

Altcoins such as Ethereum, XRP, and Solana followed Bitcoin’s trend and traded well higher.

Layoffs

In the United States, attention was primarily focused on Meta (formerly Facebook) after a report on Reuters showed that Mark Zuckerberg planned to lay off about 20% of the staff, as investment costs for AI turned out to be higher than previously thought.

Meta, which is considering its own stablecoin, has still not launched an AI model that can compete with current market leaders OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.


Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / jeroen@cryptotips.eu