Oil and bitcoin show almost no direct price link, data shows
Five years of price data show bitcoin barely reacts to oil moves, though crude can still influence it indirectly through inflation and central bank rate expectations.
Key points
- Daily, weekly and monthly correlations between bitcoin and Brent or WTI crude have been close to zero over five years, per FRED and CoinGecko data.
- Over the past 12 months WTI rose about 40% while bitcoin fell around 25%, with most of the fall coming before the February war.
- During the six biggest oil jumps of the past five years, bitcoin rose three times and fell three times.
- Binance Research found a meaningful positive correlation only in 2020-2022, which it attributes to shared liquidity rather than causation.
- The Fed raised rates by a quarter point to 3.75%-4.00% on Sept. 16, citing elevated inflation.
Bitcoin and oil prices have shown almost no meaningful correlation over the past five years, according to Bitcoin.com News, which examined daily, weekly and monthly percentage changes in Brent and WTI crude from Federal Reserve Economic Data alongside bitcoin prices from aggregators such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. The outlet reports that correlations on all three timeframes have been close to zero, where plus one would mean the two move in lockstep and minus one would mean they move in opposite directions.
This year, marked by the Iran conflict, problems in the Strait of Hormuz and sharp oil volatility, has confirmed that long-term pattern, the article says. Over the past 12 months WTI crude jumped around 40% while bitcoin fell roughly 25%, but most of bitcoin's decline came before the war began in February. From February to May, bitcoin advanced by about a quarter while oil stayed around 50% above its pre-war level, and from May through June 30 both assets dropped almost 30% without their daily moves lining up.
Bitcoin also faced its own pressures in that period, including ETF sell-offs and May's first BTC sale by Strategy since 2022, according to the report. Since the June lows, bitcoin gained 44% while WTI advanced more than 30%, again with no meaningful daily correlation. FRED and CoinGecko data show that during the six biggest oil jumps of the past five years, bitcoin rose three times and fell three times, including a 67% Brent spot jump between Feb. 25 and March 18, 2026, when bitcoin rose 5%.
No link in the data
The article explains why headlines still link the two assets: oil feeds into inflation, which shapes pressure on central banks to raise, cut or hold rates, and that in turn affects the price of money and risk assets such as bitcoin and stocks. Oil can therefore act as one bellwether of monetary policy at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, but the effect has been too small and too uneven to show up in the data. Bitcoin is moved by other forces, including ETFs, long-term investor behaviour and bitcoin reserve companies.
A Binance Research paper published in March, which examined ten years of weekly data, reached similar conclusions. It found a significant positive correlation, with a beta of 0.34 and an R-squared of 0.069, only during 2020-2022, a period of unprecedented monetary easing, and said that was best explained by a shared liquidity factor rather than any direct causal link. In all other sub-periods the correlation coefficient was indistinguishable from zero, and oil shocks raised bitcoin's short-term volatility without setting its price direction.
The report also said geopolitical oil price events are more likely to create allocation entry points than sustained risk events under the current institutionally anchored market structure. One risk it named, the Fed raising rates while oil stayed high, has since played out: on Sept. 16 the central bank raised its rate by a quarter point to 3.75%-4.00%, citing elevated inflation. Some online commentators have asked whether higher oil prices make bitcoin mining more expensive and push miners to sell, but the article says that link also looks weak because miners use a mix of renewables, nuclear, natural gas and coal, per Cambridge data.
Oil as a policy clue
The article concludes that oil is best treated as one clue to how monetary policy might change, and that policy itself is only one of many factors affecting bitcoin. It notes the market now expects two things at once over the next 12 months: the Fed raising rates at least once and keeping them elevated for some time, and bitcoin continuing to rally.