WTI Crude Extends Rally to $91.48, Bitcoin (BTC) Faces Macro Pressure

West Texas Intermediate crude settled at $91.48 a barrel on Thursday, notching its fifth consecutive daily gain as maritime supply risk spread from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the southern mouth of the Red Sea. The October WTI contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed 0.20% higher on the day, while November Brent futures on London's ICE exchange finished 0.80% up at $96.28 a barrel. The winning streak for WTI began on August 31 and has now run through five straight trading sessions. The new flashpoint is the corridor connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the passage every vessel must clear before reaching the Suez Canal, and a chokepoint for global crude oil and natural gas flows. Clashes between Yemeni government forces and Iran-aligned Houthi fighters, who have advanced to the vicinity of the strait, killed at least 129 people in a single day — among the deadliest single episodes of violence in Yemen's years-long civil war. An escalation at this bottleneck would translate into heavier shipping burdens, marine logistics costs and, downstream, energy prices. The Red Sea route was already fragile. During the earlier Houthi blockade, tanker throughput at Saudi Arabia's Yanbu port — the western terminus of the east-west pipeline linking the kingdom's eastern oil fields to the Red Sea, long floated as a Hormuz bypass — fell by more than a third, showing how quickly the alternative transport network can seize up. Washington has layered further risk on top: US President Donald Trump has signaled a possible strike on “Pickaxe Mountain,” a site suspected of housing Iran's underground nuclear facilities, keeping US-Iran tension elevated alongside the shipping threat. Traders positioning through futures contract trading or an energy sector ETF have ridden the move, though the true impact on physical crude supply volumes and seaborne freight rates still awaits confirmation in coming sessions.

Bessent Sees $40 Oil

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expects the oil spike to unwind hard once the US-Iran military confrontation runs its course. In an interview with Steve Bannon made public on Thursday, Bessent said crude should move lower on the far side of the conflict, with supply growth potentially driving prices to $50 a barrel and possibly as low as $40. The distance from the current market is wide: Brent traded above $95 on Thursday, near its highest level since July, with WTI holding around the $91 mark. The bond-market linkage is the part risk-asset traders should underline. After US and Iranian forces exchanged military strikes earlier this week, elevated energy prices fed into inflation expectations and pushed sovereign borrowing costs higher; the US 10-year Treasury yield climbed this week to its highest level since 2023. Bessent argued that the correlation between interest rates and oil has never been as tight as it is now, and that a post-conflict supply surge would pull both crude prices and bond yields down together. The Treasury Secretary also played down a proposal from Norway's sovereign wealth fund — one of the largest state investors in the world — to trim its US Treasury allocation, a move estimates suggest could reduce its holdings by $75 billion. The timing is sensitive: a measure of US federal debt crossed the $40 trillion mark for the first time on record recently, sharpening the debate over who funds America's borrowing. In Bessent's telling, the Norwegian fund is not exiting US assets at all but rotating into higher-yielding paper, including bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sanctioned housing finance agencies that typically pay more than Treasuries — an allocation he said he actively supports. For crypto, the sequence matters: cooling oil would ease the inflation pressure that has kept real yields elevated, historically a headwind for long-duration assets like Bitcoin. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

COINOTAG's aggregate market data frames the tension: our tracked universe shows BTC dominance at 68.9% and total market cap at roughly $2.32 trillion, with the leverage-sensitive Fear & Greed Index at 74 (Greed) while Bitcoin (BTC) trades just under $80K. Energy-driven yields remain the swing factor, and proof-of-work mining economics track power costs closely.