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.