In an ‘Off the Chain’ article written by Anthony Pompliano dated 15 January 2019, he stated that although Bitcoin’s (BTC) market cap may be currently lower than those of Visa and Mastercard, he would not be surprised if BTC surpasses both giants in the payment services industry in the next 36 months. He further added that legacy networks were already outdated while “the decentralized network is built for the future.”

Anthony Pompliano is one of the founders of Morgan Creek Digital Assets, a multi-strategy investment firm that provide access to blockchain technology and digital assets for institutional clients and wealthy family offices. ‘Off the Chain’ is a site that publishes crypto-related newsletters and hosts podcasts where Pompliano will discuss with guests from the crypto world about their opinions on digital assets as well as the differences in the new and old financial systems.

In the post, Pampliano wrote that while Bitcoin was composed of two main components, most press coverage tend to focus on the ‘digital asset’ component instead of the ‘transaction settlement network’ component. He described the cryptocurrency’s transaction network is a “sleeping giant” and more attention should be paid to the network which is decentralized and consists of thousands or millions of entities uniquely sharing resources to run it.

Additionally, he cited data from Diar, a cryptocurrency research firm, showing the market caps, revenue multiples and revenues in the year 2018 of renowned network firms, namely Visa, Mastercard, Twitter, Square, Facebook, Western Union, and of course Bitcoin. He did note that the following data may not be suitable to dictate the performance of a decentralized network such as BTC, however the data “adds context around the current performance and value of the transaction settlement layer.”

According to the data provided by Diar, Bitcoin’s revenue multiple of 11.1 sits just below Visa’s 14.3 and Mastercard’s 13.5. Visa’s market cap is $302 billion and Mastercard’s is $201 billion. Compared to the two transaction settlement networks, Bitcoin’s market cap is only approximately 1/5 of Visa’s and 1/3 of Mastercard’s, totalling to $64.4 billion. Only time can tell whether Pompliano’s prediction on the rise of Bitcoin over the two major transaction networks will come true.