Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency, has surpassed Visa and Mastercard in market capitalization. The BTC’s market cap of $472 billion is marginally above that of Visa. Visa has a market capitalization of about $460 billion, while Mastercard has a market capitalization of about $345 billion. As of February 2023, the crypto market capitalization stands at $1.5 trillion, making it more capitalized than Visa and Mastercard combined.
The first time that BTC surpassed Visa was in late December 2020 when BTC hit $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 regained the lead between June and October 2022 before BTC surpassed Visa for a brief moment on Oct. 1, 2022, only for the payments company to recapture the lead again.
Recovery and Overtaking
The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX had a significant impact on BTC, and its market cap dropped by over $100 billion from November, 2022. However, BTC has fully recovered and added $65 billion on top of its November 6 market cap of $408 billion to overtake the payment processing giant.
Resistance
Currently, Bitcoin is facing some resistance in the market, with two significant moving averages acting as a barrier on the weekly timeframe. The 200 and 50 Moving Averages (MA) are currently acting as resistance levels for Bitcoin. In order to move past this resistance, Bitcoin would need to break these levels with strong volume. Market analysts and experts are closely monitoring Bitcoin’s price action and volume to see if it can overcome this resistance and continue its upward trend. It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin can break through this resistance, but many investors remain optimistic about its long-term prospects.
BTC Leads in 2023
BTC’s impressive start to 2023, with its third “flippening” of Visa, came on the back of 14 consecutive days of price increases. BTC is also well ahead of the second-largest payment processing network, Mastercard, which currently has a market cap of $345 billion, according to Google Finance.
