What Happened
Gold surged roughly $100 per ounce on February 28 as U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran triggered the largest safe-haven bid since the 2022 Ukraine escalation. At approximately $5,230 per ounce, gold is approaching its all-time high of $5,602, set in October 2025. The metal has gained roughly 42% over the past year — its strongest run since the late-1970s oil crisis, when Middle Eastern conflict last reshaped global energy markets. 1
Bitcoin, meanwhile, dropped about 6% to $63,000. Oil spiked over 10%. The surface read is gold up, Bitcoin down, case closed. It's everywhere right now. It's also incomplete. What matters more than today's price action is the three-year institutional repositioning that preceded it, and what it reveals about how the world's most careful reserve managers think about risk.
Why It Matters
Today's gold spike didn't come out of nowhere. Central banks bought over 3,300 tonnes of gold between 2022 and 2024, more than double the 473-tonne annual average from 2010 to 2021. 2 In 2025, they added another 863 tonnes. The World Gold Council's 2025 survey found that 95% of central banks expect global gold reserves to increase over the next twelve months. Zero respondents — not one — anticipated a decline in their own holdings. 3
Poland's central bank was the largest buyer in 2025 at 102 tonnes, pushing its reserves to 550 tonnes. Governor Adam Glapiński publicly stated the target is 700 tonnes, citing 'national security reasons.' 2 Kazakhstan hit record annual purchases. The Czech Republic's central bank began buying Bitcoin. Bhutan quietly accumulated $750 million in BTC through state-run mining — roughly 28% of GDP.
The catalyst for this institutional stampede wasn't a war. It was a freeze. In 2022, Western nations froze approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves held in dollars and euros. 4 That single act taught every sovereign on earth the same lesson: if your reserves sit in someone else's system, they aren't really yours. Everything since — the gold buying, the Bitcoin reserves, the de-dollarization rhetoric — flows from that moment.
The instinct during conflict is to flee stocks, buy bonds, hold cash. History says that instinct is mostly backwards.
The CFA Institute analyzed U.S. capital market returns across every major conflict since World War I. The findings are counterintuitive: large-cap and small-cap stocks outperformed their long-term averages during wartime — and with lower volatility than the full historical period. The one exception was Vietnam, where returns were positive but below average. 5
Bonds, on the other hand, consistently underperformed during wars. The reason is mechanical: governments borrow aggressively to fund military operations, flooding the market with debt and pushing bond prices down. Simultaneously, war disrupts trade routes and supply chains — particularly energy — driving inflation higher. Bonds are negatively correlated with inflation. Cash erodes for the same reason. The real losers in wartime are the assets most people instinctively flee to. 5
Gold has performed well during virtually every major conflict since 1979 — surging 70% during World War II, spiking during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and the 2022 Ukraine escalation. 6 Its role as a safe haven is well-documented and real. But it's only one part of the picture.
Gold is excellent at preserving value. It's terrible at crossing borders. You can't memorize gold. You can't send it over a satellite link. You can't divide it into precise amounts and transfer it in minutes without a trusted intermediary.
If the conflict is far away and you're a U.S. investor watching Middle Eastern missiles on CNN, gold is the traditional answer. It sits in a vault, it appreciates, you sleep well. But in a world where the conflict is at your door — where you need to move, where borders tighten, where communications go down, where governments impose capital controls — the asset that exists as information you can carry in your head has properties gold physically cannot match.
This is not an argument that Bitcoin is better than gold. It's an argument that they solve different problems across different threat scenarios. Gold hedges uncertainty. Bitcoin hedges adversarial conditions — seizure, confiscation, capital controls, the need to move wealth without anyone's permission. The Ukrainians who fled with Bitcoin on a USB drive in 2022 understood this. The Russians whose bank accounts and foreign reserves were frozen understood it from the other side.
Both nations currently engaged in active military operations hold Bitcoin. Iran holds roughly 190,000 BTC in seized assets. The U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve holds approximately 328,000 BTC. El Salvador holds over 6,100 BTC. Bhutan accumulated about $750 million worth through sovereign mining operations.
Wars don't kill the nation-state accumulation thesis. They accelerate it. Conflict forces governments to think about sanctions-resistant reserves, seizure-proof stores of value, and assets that function when the banking system is under stress. Every freeze, every sanction, every seized account reinforces the game theory that pushes sovereigns toward assets no single government controls. 7
Central banks chose gold for the same reason. Poland isn't buying 700 tonnes because gold is a good trade. It's buying because NATO's eastern flank borders a war zone, and reserves denominated in other nations' currencies can be weaponized. The logic applies whether you're a central bank or a person with a family to protect.
What This Means for You
Hold hard assets — and understand why you hold each one. Gold preserves wealth when the world is uncertain. Bitcoin preserves wealth when the world is adversarial. They're not competitors. They're layers of the same security model, optimized for different failure modes. A portfolio with both is more resilient than a portfolio with either alone.
Audit your counterparty exposure. If your gold is in an ETF, a bank vault, or a third-party custodian, you have counterparty risk — structurally identical to the risk that made Russia's $300 billion in reserves disappear overnight. The same applies to Bitcoin on an exchange. Physical gold in your possession and Bitcoin in self-custody are the only configurations that fully remove the counterparty. Everything else is a trust assumption.
Don't let today's price action define your strategy. Gold is up $100. Bitcoin is down $4,000. Six months from now, those numbers will be different. The structural forces — government borrowing to fund wars, inflationary pressure from energy disruption, sanctions weaponizing the dollar system, central bank de-dollarization — are multi-year trends. They don't reverse because of one Saturday's trading.
Build in layers. Cash for liquidity. Gold for stability. Bitcoin for sovereignty. Real assets (land, tools, skills) for resilience. No single asset survives every scenario. The goal isn't to pick the winner. It's to build a position that doesn't have a single point of failure.
What to Watch
Monday's market open for gold — COMEX faces resistance at $5,300/oz, and a breakout above that level would signal sustained institutional demand beyond the initial panic bid. OPEC+ meets Sunday, and any emergency output announcement tells you producers are genuinely concerned about prolonged supply disruption.
Whether central bank gold buying accelerates after the Iran strikes. Poland's governor cited national security before this war started. If smaller nations begin announcing gold purchases or Bitcoin reserve programs in the next 30 days, the sovereign accumulation thesis just got a real-world stress test — and passed.
Sanctions expansion. Every time the U.S. or EU freezes a new set of sovereign or institutional assets, it reinforces the case for non-sovereign stores of value. Watch for new OFAC designations targeting Iranian financial infrastructure and whether secondary sanctions ripple into Gulf-state banking relationships.