The Flippening is the term for the moment that Ethereum will become the biggest cryptocurrency. In other words, the total market capitalization of Ethereum will surpass that of Bitcoin. That has not been the case in the history of crypto. This is of course hypothetical. It is a fun and hotly debated if and when it will ever happen.
At What Exact Price Point Will the Flippening Happen?
We can express the price of ETH in BTC in the same way we can express it in dollars. The price of ETH has recently hovered around 0.07 BTC. At what price will we see the flippening? There is not an exact price point Let’s explain.
This price point would be easy to pinpoint if there were a fixed amount of BTC and ETH in circulation. For example, if we would have 20 million BTC and 120 million Ether, we could easily say: at the point when the price of ETH crosses above 20/120 = 0.1667 BTC, the flippening is upon us. Indeed, as a rough measure, the chart of the flippening will be extra interesting to watch closely when the ETH price will approach 0.16 BTC. But if we want to be precise we have to take the following into account.
A Moving Target
The problem is that this hypothetical 0.1667 is a moving target. Why? the amount of both BTC and ETH in circulation constantly changes. At least, the issuance schedule of BTC is known. We can know at each moment in the past and future know how many there are in circulation. For ETH, this depends on the future popularity of the network. This is because of its burning mechanism, which increases with usage.
So the way to determine the flippening would be to compare which is bigger:
The total amount of BTC * price per BTC
versus
The total amount of ETH * price per ETH.
This way of comparing market caps is to know which is bigger (we disregard for a second that realistically, lots of BTC and ETH have been lost in real or imagined boating accidents).
You don’t have to calculate this yourself. On TradingView, there is a list with market cap per coin.
Different Flippening Metrics for a Flippening
Market Cap is an important metric to determine importance. But to get a deep understanding of the relevance of a coin, there are more metrics on which one can flip the other.
- Which crypto projects do people pay to use? In terms of fees, Ethereum flipped Bitcoin a long time ago. At the time of writing, the average daily fees by users are 20 times higher on Ethereum compared to Bitcoin.
- Another Ethereum metric that has already flipped Bitcoin is the number of transactions.
See a chart of Blockchain Center with the current value of the Flippening but also other flippening metrics (100% is the flippening threshold).
Ethereum Already Came Close to Flippening Bitcoin
Mid-June 2017 was when Ethereum came closest to flipping Bitcoin: it reached 83% of Bitcoin’s market cap.
The years after that marked a clear downtrend, but since the 2020/21 bull run, ETH is climbing again.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Have Different Purposes
Is there only room for one ‘true’ native internet money? Are we in a ‘Highlander-type world’, where one must knock out the others? Or can the Flippening still mean that coins co-exist?
No, there can be more than one. Bitcoin and Ethereum have different…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
