Bitcoin market cap ‘flips’ payments giant Visa for the 3rd time

The 48% surge in Bitcoin (BTC) prices since the start of the year has pushed the BTC market cap beyond payment processing giant Visa once again.

With the current BTC price at $24,365, the $470.16 billion market capitalization is now higher than Visa’s $469.87 billion market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.

BTC has “flipped” Visa again. Source: CoinMarketCap.

This is the third time BTC has “flipped” Visa’s market cap, according to Companies Market Cap.

The first time came at the end of December 2020 when BTC also reached $25,000 for the first time. This was achieved during a price surge that saw BTC rally from $10,200 in September 2020 to $63,170 seven months later in April 2021.

Visa took the lead again between June and October 2022, which then saw BTC surpass Visa briefly on October 1st before the payments company regained the lead.

This lead increased when the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX shaved more than $100 billion from BTC in four days between November 6-10, 2022.

However, since then, BTC has fully recovered and piled up an additional $65 billion above its November 6 market cap of $408 billion to overtake the payment processing giant.

It should be noted that given the small difference in market cap between BTC and Visa, both are currently flipping every hour.

related: What is the Lightning Network in Bitcoin, and how does it work?

As an impressive start to BTC for 2023, the third “flippening” Visa comes at the end of 14 consecutive days of price increases between January 4-17.

BTC is also ahead of the second largest payment processing network Mastercard, which currently has a market cap of $345.24 billion, according to Google Finance.

BTC is still down 63% from its peak price of $69,044, which was reached on November 10, 2021.