Since the beginning of the year, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has increased by 48%, which has caused its market valuation to once again surpass that of the payment processing behemoth Visa.
According to CoinMarketCap, with the price of Bitcoin sitting at $24,365 at the moment, its market size of $470.16 billion is now only slightly more than that of Visa, which has a market cap of $469.87 billion at the moment.
Companies Market Cap reports that this is the third time Bitcoin has “flipped” Visa’s market cap, meaning that Bitcoin’s value has exceeded Visa’s value.
The first occasion was in late December 2020, coincidentally coinciding with the first time that BTC reached $25,000 in value.
This was accomplished during a price rise that saw BTC climb from $10,200 in September 2020 to $63,170 seven months later in April 2021. The price increase lasted for seven months.
BTC was able to take the lead over Visa for a very short period of time on October 1 before the payments business was able to reclaim their position as the market leader. Visa regained the lead between June and October 2022.
This advantage was further extended when, between November 6 and 10, 2022, the failure of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX took off more than $100 billion from the value of BTC in only four days.
However, since that time, BTC has had a complete recovery and has added an extra $65 billion to its market valuation of $408 billion as of November 6. This has allowed it to surpass the payment processing behemoth.
Because of the relatively tiny gap in their respective market caps, Bitcoin and Visa are now trading places on an hourly basis, which is something that should be taken into consideration.
Regarding the remarkable beginning that Bitcoin had in 2023, its third “flipping” of Visa occurred on the heels of a run of 14 days in a row during which the price increased. This run lasted from January 4 through January 17.
According to Google Finance, the market capitalization of Mastercard, the world’s second-largest payment processing network, is now $345.24 billion. BTC, on the other hand, has a significant lead over Mastercard.
However, Bitcoin is still trading at a discount of 63% compared to its all-time high of $69,044 that it hit on November 10th, 2021.
