“Iran wants to make a deal, and I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet”

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• Block Scholes x Panoptic: Bridging The Onchain Convexity Gap

• Volatility Report: February 2026

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• Bybit x Block Scholes: “2026: It's Different This Time?”

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• After falling to $66K on Sun 8 March, BTC’s price increased steadily over the past week and it now trades above $73K — a more than 10% gain from trough to peak. 
• Crypto assets have continued to show strong resilience since late February as uncertainty over the length of the conflict in the Middle East continues — ETH is up 5.95% over the past 24 hours while SOL is up 4.68% and HYPE is up 5.47% over the same period. 
• Since President Trump’s first announcement that the US had struck Iran with military airstrikes, BTC is up 11%, while gold is down -4.9% and the S&P 500 is down -3.6%. 
• Bitcoin has also been supported by a tentative rebound in institutional appetite. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw inflows of $763M last week, their third week of inflows while Strategy announced a purchase of $1.277B of bitcoins between March 2 and March 8. 

• US equities fared worse over the past week. The S&P 500 finished Friday’s session down 0.61%, marking its third-straight week of declines, while US treasuries, as measured by Bloomberg’s US Treasury Total Return Index, have erased all of their year-to-date gains. 
• Megacap tech stocks have entered a technical correction as the Mag-7 is now down 10% from its October all-time high.
• Brent crude oil is currently trading around $104 a barrel after climbing past $106 after the US struck military targets on Kharg Island, a key terminal which exports 90% of Iran’s oil. WTI oil is trading just under $100 a barrel.

• Meanwhile, neither the US or Iran have signalled any signs of easing the conflict. 
• Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the country had not yet reached out to the US for talks or a potential ceasefire in response to comments made by President Trump over the weekend where he said Iran is willing to make a deal but the US wants better terms.
• Trump told NBC News, “Iran wants to make a deal, and I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet”, and that a “very solid” agreement will require Iran to abandon any commitments to owning nuclear weapons. 
• In an interview on Sunday with CBS, Araghachi said “We don’t see any reason why we should talk with Americans, because we were talking with them when they decided to attack us, and that was for the second time”. 
• According to a report from the International Energy Agency last week, “The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”. A day earlier, after member nations agreed to release 400M barrels from emergency reserves to help alleviate some of the supply concerns. 

• Weighing on sentiment even further, consumer spending in the US barely rose in January, suggesting a slowdown in consumer momentum before the Middle East conflict broke out. 
• Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending increased 0.1% from December, while the second estimate for real-GDP growth in Q4 2025 saw it halved to 0.7%. 
• Additionally, consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s preliminary March sentiment index, fell to a three-month low. 
• The survey period included responses from Feb 17 to March 9 — according to Joanne Hsu, director of the survey, “Interviews completed prior to the military action in Iran showed an improvement in sentiment from last month, but lower readings seen during the nine days thereafter completely erased those initial gains”. 

• Australia’s Senate Economics Legislation Committee has backed the country’s proposed crypto bill, advancing a framework that would require digital asset platforms and tokenised custody providers to obtain financial licences, as announced in the report released today.
• If passed, the legislation would bring crypto intermediaries under a regime similar to other financial services providers, with rules covering custody, transaction execution, disclosure and client asset protection. 

• South Korea’s Hana Financial Group has partnered with Standard Chartered to explore joint digital asset initiatives, including stablecoins, in a sign of growing institutional commitment to the sector in Asia.
• The collaboration brings together one of South Korea’s largest financial groups, which generated more than $2.67B in net income in 2025, with a global bank that has already launched institutional spot BTC and ETH trading and expanded digital asset custody across multiple jurisdictions.

• The Ethereum Foundation has completed a $10.2M OTC sale of 5,000 ETH to BitMine Immersion Technologies at an average price of $2,042.96 per ETH, marking its second direct treasury sale to a corporate buyer after last year’s SharpLink transaction, according to their post on X.

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dismissed its civil case against BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji, ending the lawsuit without penalties and with prejudice.
• The case originally accused Al-Naji of defrauding investors through the BitClout social-token platform and its dismissal comes as part of a broader trend of US regulators dropping crypto-related cases.

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