Bitcoin market cap tops $479 billion, now worth more than Visa

Toward the end of February, the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization has crossed $479 billion in value. As such, Bitcoin temporarily flipped the market caps of Visa, JPMorgan, JPMorgan Chase, and other financial services giants. In comparison, Mastercard and Visa were valued at $469 billion and $344 billion, respectively.

For the wider crypto sphere, the data shows that transaction volumes of major cryptocurrencies have now overtaken the stalwarts of the business world by high margins.

According to data from Companies Market Cap – an aggregator which ranks the top global assets by market cap –USDT’s transactions volumes hit $18.2 trillion in 2022, placing the stablecoin ahead of traditional payment processors like Visa and Mastercard.

If the same growth rate could be achieved in the months ahead, interesting things will be bound to happen in the future, including Bitcoin overtaking Alphabet by the end of 2023. Although such a surge may seem ambitious, the aforementioned growth rate theoretically puts the cryptocurrency on target to surpass $13 trillion in transactions.

This does not mean that people are or will actively spending trillions using cryptocurrency on goods and services, as a big portion of Bitcoin transactions are merely used for speculative trading. But such milestones in themselves are a big step forward, as it shows how cryptocurrencies are scalable, even while its use cases are being disputed by those who call them fraud, a bubble, or worse.

In November 2021, Bitcoin’s market capitalization hovered around $1.23 trillion, making it more capitalized than some of the world’s biggest banks combined, including JPMorgan and Bank of America. Before crashing back down in 2022, bitcoin’s market cap surpassed those of notable names such as Netflix, Walmart, Samsung, Alibaba, Berkshire Hathaway, Tesla, Facebook, and more.