Bitcoin surged past $111,000 on Bitcoin Pizza Day, driving $232 million in liquidations and pushing its realized cap toward $1 trillion

Bitcoin rallied to a new all-time high of $111,861 early on Bitcoin Pizza Day, celebrated every year on May 22 to commemorate the first real-world transaction in which bitcoin was used as a currency.

On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida, paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, marking bitcoin’s first commercial use. 

At the time, the transaction would have been worth around $41. Today, it would have been worth more than $1.1 billion.

Bitcoin’s price action led to $232 million worth of liquidations over 24 hours for those betting on a lower bitcoin price.

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Bitcoin’s realized capitalization is nearing its next major milestone of $1 trillion, according to onchain intelligence platform Glassnode. 

Realized capitalization is an alternative to traditional market capitalization for digital assets, which instead of valuing every coin at the current market price, values each individual coin at the price it was last moved onchain.

“It took just 2 years to go from $1M to $1B (2011-2013), but nearly 6 years to move from $100B to $1T,” Glassnode said. “As BTC matures, growth slows and each leap requires exponentially more capital.”