Google Trends: high interest in the crypto industry

When analyzing Google Trends data about crypto markets, a very dynamic picture emerges. 

The global financial market crisis in mid-March, coupled with the collapse of the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has brought a lot of attention back to these topics, which have been in the shadows since June last year. 

For example, as far as bitcoin is concerned, the volume of searches on Google worldwide returned to the levels of mid-May 2019, when the price began to rise from $5,500 to over $8,000. 

But this time the peak of searches lasted two weeks, continuing in the week after the collapse, when the price, which fell below $5,000 on March 13th, was beginning to return above $6,000. 

This was the peak in the volume of searches after the real boom at the end of June 2019, when the price had exceeded $10,000 and was about to reach a peak of $13,000. 

Something similar, but to a lesser extent, happened to Ethereum, whose new peak of searches, however, occurred in mid-February, when there was a significant increase in the price that brought ETH above $280. 

Worth noting that a month later the price dropped to $100, but the volume of searches on Google was lower. 

Ripple on Google Trends

A completely different story, instead, concerns Ripple, whose volume of searches seems much more constant over the last 12 months. The curious thing is that during the Ethereum search peaks, these have exceeded those of Ripple, but during the rest of the year Ripple’s searches were on average higher than those of Ethereum. 

On the other hand, the price of XRP has also registered more moderate fluctuations in the last 12 months, with a peak of $0.48 in June 2019 followed by a long descent to a minimum of $0.14 in mid-March, and then a slight rise to $0.18. 

In both cases, however, the search volume of both Ethereum and Ripple is still much lower than that of Bitcoin, which oscillates between 10 and 20 times as much.

Quite curious, even if much lower, is the curve of Tether’s searches, as it is very constant. 

It looks as if the stability of the value somehow reflects on the stability of the volume of searches, which during the last 12 months has not registered any significant fluctuation. 

In the light of these data, there seems to be a rather evident correlation between the fluctuations in the price of cryptocurrencies and the volume of searches on Google, probably because the most significant price fluctuations in the short term are the ones that attract the attention of the general public. 

The fact that they practically never go to zero, not even during periods of maximum calm on the crypto markets, reveals that there is certainly an interest that goes beyond the purely speculative, although it is clear that speculation is still the main driver with regard to the attention of the masses for these relatively young assets. 

Crypto mentions on Twitter

Lastly, a comparison with the volume of mentions on Twitter, reveals that the peaks occurred at the same time, but with different degrees of magnitude. 

Thus, it is possible that price fluctuations also affect the volume of mentions on Twitter, but with slightly different dynamics. In particular, excluding the individual peaks, the Twitter curves seem to be more constant than those of Google, perhaps because the volume of searches is more symptomatic of the interest of the masses, while the volume of mentions on Twitter could instead be more influenced by the behaviour of insiders, fans or simple sympathizers of these new technologies.