Since the beginning of the year, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has increased by 48%, causing its market valuation to once again surpass that of payment processing giant Visa.

According to CoinMarketCap, with Bitcoin priced at $24,365 right now, its market size of $470.16 billion is now only slightly more than Visa’s, which has a market capitalization of $469.87 billion. at the moment.

Companies Market Cap reports that this is the third time that Bitcoin has “flipped” Visa’s market cap, meaning that the value of Bitcoin has outpaced the value of Visa.

The first occasion was at the end of December 2020, coincidentally coinciding with the first time BTC reached a value of $25,000.

This was accomplished during a price surge that saw BTC rise from $10,200 in September 2020 to $63,170 seven months later in April 2021. The price surge lasted for seven months.

BTC was able to take the lead over Visa for a very short period of time on October 1 before the payments business was able to regain its position as the market leader. Visa regained the lead between June and October 2022.

This advantage was further extended when, between November 6 and 10, 2022, the failure of cryptocurrency exchange FTX took more than $100 billion from the value of BTC in just four days.

However, since then, BTC has made a full recovery and has added an additional $65 billion to its market value of $408 billion as of Nov. 6. This has allowed it to outperform the payment processing giant.

Due to the relatively small gap in their respective market capitalizations, Bitcoin and Visa now trade places hourly, something to be noted.

As for Bitcoin’s remarkable start to 2023, its third Visa flipping came after a 14-day streak of rising price. This race lasted from January 4 to 17.

According to Google Finance, the market capitalization of Mastercard, the world’s second largest payment processing network, is now $345.24 billion. BTC, on the other hand, has a significant advantage over Mastercard.

However, Bitcoin is still trading at a 63% discount compared to its all-time high of $69,044 reached on November 10, 2021.