Insights

How crypto quants parse geopolitics, and what the Iran war just rewired

On March 6, the world's largest gold ETF shed $3 billion in a single session. Over the same window, BlackRock's IBIT pulled in $306 million. JPMorgan's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou put numbers on the rotation in a research note that landed quietly the following week: GLD had lost roughly 2.7% of its AUM in outflows since the start of the Iran war, while IBIT had gained 1.5%. For ten years, the digital gold thesis was something Bitcoin maximalists asserted and the market quietly disproved at every test. On March 6 the test went the other way for the first time.