“Let the oil flow!”

Block Scholes is an FCA-regulated institutional crypto derivatives analytics platform. Live data, IV surfaces, and backtesting available via blockscholes.com.

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In Today's Note

• Crypto rebounded after the US-Iran peace deal, with BTC moving from $64K to nearly $66K, ETH trading back above $1,700, and spot Bitcoin ETFs breaking their outflow streak.
• Oil prices fell sharply, with crude down close to 6% over the past 24 hours after Trump confirmed the deal and said the Strait of Hormuz would fully reopen.
• Options markets showed less downside demand, with BTC and ETH term structures normalising and put-call skew recovering from the deeply negative levels seen earlier in June.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

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Macro & Markets

• Optimism that a diplomatic route out of the US-Iran war was on the cards helped send sentiment in the riskier corners of the market higher, pushing up US equities in Friday’s session. 
• In fact, late last night President Trump confirmed the breaking news that after nearly four months of conflict, the US and Iran have reached a more permanent peace deal. 
• On Truth Social, the President wrote “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete” and would involve a full reopening of the Hormuz Strait, “toll free”, as well as an “immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade”.

• In the same post, Trump said “Let the oil flow!” 
• Crude oil prices plunged close to 6% in the last 24 hours, currently trading around $80 per barrel on Monday, a two-month low, and only $10 above pre-conflict levels. 
• A few moments before Trump’s post, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, which has acted as a mediator throughout the conflict, said the US and Iran had agreed to sign the memorandum of understanding in Switzerland on June 19, 2026.
• According to a statement from the secretariat of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, the deal will bring an end to military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, which had been a sticking point in previous negotiations.

• Crypto markets rebounded strongly in response to the news. BTC jumped up from $64K to just shy of $66K, while ETH now trades above $1,700 — a level it struggled to break past last week. 
• Spot Bitcoin ETFs also broke a five day outflow streak on Friday, with inflows amounting to $85.9M. 
• In options markets, both BTC and ETH’s at-the-money implied vol term structures have normalised, while traders have slowly priced out much of the bearish premium towards put options that we saw earlier in June. 
• 7-day 25-delta put-call skew for BTC is currently trading at -3.5%, relative to a June low of -19.0%. 
• Similarly, 7-day ETH skew is trading at -3.2% relative to a low close to -20%. That suggests, options traders across both markets are demanding far lower premiums for downside protection now. 

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• Data on Friday showed US consumer sentiment rose in early June for the first time in four months, driven in part by lower gasoline prices.
• The University of Michigan’s preliminary sentiment index rose to 48.9 in June from a record low of 44.8 in May, exceeding expectations but still the second lowest reading in the index which began in the 1970s.
• Consumers expect prices to rise at an annual rate of 4.6% over the next year, down from 4.8% in May.
• According to the director of the survey, “Despite the mild reprieve, elevated gas prices remain highly salient to consumers. Thus, the current level of gas prices continues to be broadly unacceptable to consumers and dampens their views of the economy.”

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto3

• The Bitcoin network recorded a 10.09% mining difficulty reduction on June 14, lowering difficulty to 124.93 trillion, marking the second-largest downward adjustment of 2026 and the lowest difficulty level since July 2025.
• The adjustment followed a decline in bitcoin prices and mining profitability that led some operators to shut down less efficient machines, causing blocks to be mined more slowly and triggering the automatic difficulty reset.

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico against Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Attorney General Raúl Torrez and other state officials, seeking to block the state from applying gaming laws to prediction market contracts.
• The filing comes after New Mexico regulators took action against Kalshi, alleging the platform lacked the required license and allowed participation by users below the state's legal gambling age of 21.
• CFTC Chair Michael Selig said New Mexico was seeking to “nullify black letter law and decades of judicial precedent,” while the agency argued that the Commodity Exchange Act gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts traded on federally regulated exchanges.

• Former SEC and CFTC Chair Gary Gensler filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which is hearing a case between Kalshi and Ohio regulators, arguing that the Dodd-Frank Act did not grant the CFTC authority over sports betting or sports-related prediction markets.
• The filing directly challenges the position of both Kalshi and current CFTC leadership, who maintain that prediction market contracts fall under federal commodities regulation rather than state gambling laws.
• Gensler also questioned the agency's ability to oversee the sector, arguing the CFTC never sought funding to regulate sports betting and "lacks the experience to do so."

• Bybit, Binance and Bitget canceled planned allocations of tokenized SpaceX IPO shares after failing to secure enough underlying stock to meet overwhelming investor demand, with provider xStocks unable to fully deliver the expected allocations.
• All three platforms announced full refunds and additional compensation for affected users, while Kraken, which acquired xStocks, said it received a smaller allocation than expected and was only able to partially fill some customer orders before returning unfilled funds.
• This highlights the operational challenges of offering 1:1 share-backed tokenized equities, where issuers must first obtain sufficient underlying shares before distributing tokens to investors.

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