Three finance and tech giants that Bitcoin has surpassed in terms of market cap this year

Bitcoin has grown from strength to strength in the last few years. In a little over a decade, BTC’s valuation has skyrocketed from a few cents to its current price of $24,581 (at the time of writing). This rapid growth has seen Bitcoin surpass some of the world’s biggest and most established firms in terms of market capitalisation.

In fact, just this year alone, the legacy cryptocurrency has flipped three of the most renowned names from the tech and TradFi industry. In the process, Bitcoin became one of the most valuable asset in the world by market cap. But which 3 firms did BTC flip this year and how? Tag along to find out.

Bitcoin has always been criticised for its slow transaction processing times. On a good day, Bitcoin can handle a maximum of 7 transactions per second (TPS). This pales in comparison to the global finance giant, Visa, which can process upwards of 24,000 TPS. Despite this vast gulf, Bitcoin has still managed to overtake Visa in terms of market capitalisation.

On Feb 20 this year, Bitcoin’s market cap touched $470.16 billion, which was a sliver more than Visa’s $469.87 billion. This was the third instance when BTC surpassed Visa in terms of market cap, the other two times being in Dec 2020 and Oct 2022. Bitcoin has gone on to extend its lead over Visa, with a current market cap of $476.40 billion. At the same time, Visa’s market cap has declined to $459.57 billion.

Interestingly, Bitcoin has also long surpassed Visa’s counterpart, Mastercard, which has a market cap of $336.32 billion.

Bitcoin achieved a major milestone yesterday, March 14, as it outpaced Meta’s market cap of $469 billion. Meta has been reeling from major losses after failing to capitalise on its metaverse push. The company rebranded from Facebook to Meta in 2021 to emphasize its expansion in the web3 realm. However, none of its endeavours have panned out so far, leaving the company with heavy losses and a declining market cap.

For instance, the company’s metaverse unit, Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), posted consecutive losses in every quarter of 2022. In all, FRL posted losses of more than $13.7 billion in 2022. During the same period, the company also shuttered several of its digital asset projects, including its stablecoin project, Diem and its crypto wallet project, Novi. Most recently, Meta also made a U-turn on its NFT plans for Instagram. The company was also hit by recession and declared thousands of job cuts in the last couple of months. As such, the company’s market cap has seen a steady decline over the last few months.

However, Meta shares jumped nearly 7 percent on Tuesday afternoon, giving it a valuation upward of $500 billion for the first time in nine months. This allowed Meta to overthrow Bitcoin and recapture its number 11 spot on the list of top assets by market capitalisation.

On Jan 18, Bitcoin dethroned electric car manufacturer, Tesla, in terms of market capitalisation. BTC's market cap crossed the $440 billion mark, while Tesla's market cap dropped to $421.30 billion, causing it to fall behind BTC.

Tesla’s share price dropped to a 2-year low of $113.06 on Jan 6. This is after the EV maker struggled with increased manufacturing costs and post-COVID supply chain issues in 2022. To make matters worse, the drama around Elon Musk’s Twitter deal and fears around declining sales in China caused Tesla’s stock to plummet.

Conversely, Bitcoin registered massive gains in the start of 2023, jumping from $16,585 on Jan 1 to $23,268 on Jan 20. This allowed BTC to breeze past Tesla in terms of market capitalisation. However, the EV maker soon recouped its losses and leap-frogged past the legacy coin a few weeks later.

Currently, Elon Musk's Tesla holds the 8th position in terms of market cap with $579 billion, while Bitcoin stands 10th with a market cap of $499 billion. Whether Bitcoin will outperform Tesla again is difficult to predict due to unforeseeable factors affecting the valuation of these two assets.

While Bitcoin may have handed back positions to Meta and Tesla, the fact that it was able to overtake these giants is a commendable feat. It shows that cryptocurrencies have entered the main-stay and could have a bright future ahead. As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin currently ranks 12th in terms of market capitalisation amongst the top 100 assets, ahead of several of the world’s biggest companies and brands. This is an encouraging sign for the legacy cryptocurrency and the broader web3 industry as well.