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The narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean handles roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply.
Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser has warned that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is draining approximately 100 million barrels of oil from global markets every single week. The cumulative loss from the ongoing disruption has already approached 1 billion barrels.
Nasser’s assessment goes further than the immediate crisis. He has projected that if the Hormuz disruptions persist for several more weeks, oil markets may not stabilize until 2027.
Most of the world’s spare oil production capacity sits in the Persian Gulf, the very region that’s currently cut off. Efforts to mitigate the crisis, including rerouting shipments through alternative passages and drawing down strategic petroleum reserves, have provided some relief, but alternative supply routes add transit time, cost, and complexity, and strategic reserves are finite.
Despite the chaos, Aramco itself reported a 26% increase in profits for Q1. When supply gets squeezed, prices go up, and when you’re the world’s largest oil company with production facilities that are still operating, higher prices translate directly to fatter margins.
For crypto markets, a multi-year energy crisis that drives persistent inflation could strengthen the narrative around crypto as an inflation hedge. However, severe energy crises tend to cause broad risk-off behavior across all asset classes, crypto included, and the correlation between Bitcoin and risk assets tends to spike during genuine panic events.
Bitcoin mining is energy-intensive by design. A sustained surge in global energy costs compresses margins for miners, potentially forcing less efficient operations offline, which reduces hashrate and can create volatility in both mining stocks and Bitcoin itself.
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