Since the beginning of the year, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has surged 48%, causing Bitcoin’s market valuation to once again overtake that of payments processing giant Visa. According to CoinMarketCap, bitcoin is currently priced at $24,365 and its market size of $470.16 billion is only slightly larger than Visa, which currently has a market cap of $469.87 billion.
Companies Market Cap reports that this is the third time Bitcoin has “flipped” Visa’s market cap, meaning Bitcoin’s value has exceeded Visa’s value. The first time this happened was in late December 2020, which coincidentally coincided with the first time BTC hit $25,000.
This happened during a price surge that took BTC from $10,200 in September 2020 to $63,170 seven months later in April 2021. The price increase lasted for seven months. BTC briefly took the lead from Visa on October 1, before the payments company reclaimed its position as the market leader. Between June and October 2022, Visa was able to regain the lead.
That lead was further extended when between November 6 and 10, 2022, the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX drained more than $100 billion from the value of BTC in just four days. Since then, however, BTC has fully recovered, adding another $65 billion to its market value of $408 billion (as of Nov. 6). In doing so, it has overtaken the payment processing giant.
Due to the relatively small gap between their respective market caps, Bitcoin and Visa are now swapping places every hour, which should not be disregarded. As for Bitcoin’s remarkable start in 2023, the third “flipping” comparison to Visa came after a streak of 14 consecutive days of price increases. This surge lasted from January 4th to 17th.
According to Google Finance, the market capitalization of Mastercard, the second largest payments network in the world, is currently $345.24 billion. BTC, on the other hand, has a significant lead over Mastercard. However, Bitcoin is still trading at a 63% discount to its all-time high of $69,044, which it hit on November 10, 2021.
Bitcoin sees renewed rejection of $25,000 as volatility returns ahead of Wall Street
BTC price is slipping again while attempting to clear the $25K resistance as the rejection continues. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD hit $25,250 on Bitstamp. After a sharp rejection on an hourly basis, the pair then returned below $24,750 and stayed in a range throughout the weekend.
With Wall Street on vacation on Feb. 20, Bitcoin traded after hours for three days, bringing with it less liquidity and greater risk of volatile moves up and down. To some extent, it has, as efforts to surpass last week’s highs have been short-lived, prompting liquidations from both long and short traders, data from Coinglass confirms.
Monitoring the Material Indicators resource has further traced the source of the flash volatility in the form of whale traders on the exchanges attempting to move the market with massive bid and ask liquidity.
“2500 BTC in sell orders is stacking between $24.8-25.3K on the BTC/USDT pair,” noted trader Daan Crypto Trades continued. “There could be three reasons for this: 1. Actual sell orders. 2. Price suppression orders to fulfill orders before canceling or repurchasing them later. 3. Orders to depress the price.”
Another trader, Crypto Tony, was also cautious about the potential to clear the resistance. “We’re grinding at $25,000 once again here but the question remains whether to stay above this resistance zone or deviate and come back down,” a Twitter comment said on the day.
Updating an existing theory, Venturefounder, a contributor at on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, predicted a retest of lower levels before Bitcoin continues to move higher, citing market conditions from mid-2021, the year in which BTC/USD hit a “double top” all-time high in April and November respectively.
“$25k BTC is very similar to $31k in July 2021,” he argued. “Bitcoin could surge above it in a ‘fakeout’ but likely to retest lower support before consolidating and resuming uptrend.”
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