Searches for Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen 83% since hitting highs in 2021, according to data from Google Trends. After hitting an all-time high of 100 in early May 2021, searches related to Ethereum fell to 17, while for Bitcoin the drop was 79% over the same period.
Search volumes for both cryptocurrencies are at their lowest levels since late 2020, coinciding with the bear market that has seen the price of each drop 65% to 70% from record highs posted last November. These low levels also come as Ethereum is about to launch the merger, an event that does not appear to have rekindled public interest in cryptocurrencies yet.
Continuation of the bear market
Google is updating the way it collects and records data, so direct volume comparisons over the past few years aren’t 100% reliable. Nonetheless, the available data paints a bleak picture of the market, as it suggests a lack of interest from retail investors and investors.
Other data backs up Google’s numbers to varying degrees. According to BitInfoCharts, the number of tweets per day on the subject of Bitcoin has increased from 363,000 in May 2021 to just over 100,000 today. The same goes for Ethereum, which peaked at 136,000 in March this year, before falling back to around 40,000.
This information indicates less a collapse of public interest than a gradual decline. That said, a closer look at the data on tweets, for example, shows a partial recovery over the past few months.
In the case of Ethereum, the number of tweets per day dipped to 20,000 in July, before more than doubling in a few months. For its part, Bitcoin has seen a more or less continuous decline since March.
These numbers coincide with the price data, which is likely driving the public interest in cryptocurrencies. For example, Bitcoin is down 56.3% from its 2022 peak, which was around $47,459.
This trend is observable in other sectors: searches for “NFTs”, for example, peaked at 100 in January this year, falling to 13 today.
Searches for “metaverse” also declined from a January peak of 18. Along with all the other search data, this suggests the market is in a bear cycle.
Can the merger revive public interest?
The market has been deprived of exceptionally good news in 2022, although the upcoming Ethereum merger should be an exception. The excitement surrounding this move to proof of stake saw the price of ETH jump from $1,435 in late August to $1,700 at the time of writing, a jump of around 18.5%. .
Unfortunately, the relative outperformance of ETH against BTC has done little to attract mainstream attention. Going back to the aforementioned Google Trends data, searches for ETH also declined over the short to medium term, with 12-month highs in June declining over the following months.
The situation is arguably worse for Bitcoin, however. Google’s data shows that over the past five years, it hasn’t regained the public interest seen in December 2017, which still represents its record high on the search engine.
The market is in very unpromising macroeconomic conditions. Inflation is high across much of the developed world, while rising interest rates have also dampened global equity markets.
In such a context, the crypto market has little hope of seeing a massive revival of interest from the public. This explains why Google Trends data is so low, and why Twitter data is down from previous peaks.
The merger, however, managed to get some mainstream media to paint the crypto sector in a semi-positive way, specifically Ethereum. The normally left-leaning UK newspaper The Guardian published a positive article about how Ethereum will reduce its power consumption by 99%.
At the same time, some analysts and commentators have suggested that this widespread lack of interest indicates that now is a good time to buy. In other words, it shows that the market is bottoming out, with coins selling at a steep discount to their “true” value.
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