Original Title: "Google Trends as a Retail Barometer: Key Insights"
Author: Stacy Muur, Web3 Researcher
Translated by: xiaozou, Jinse Finance
The second decade of Bitcoin has passed the halfway mark, and the 20th anniversary is not far away. During this period, the crypto world has undergone unpredictable changes, influenced by market sentiment, political strategies, and the alternation of bull and bear market cycles.
Despite these fluctuations, new users are constantly entering the crypto world through various channels. What are the most popular ones? Let's explore the answer in this article.
1. Common Keywords
To better understand the changes in user interest, I analyzed Google Trends data over the past five years. This period covers both bull and bear market cycles, providing an objective perspective.
People often search for general concepts like "crypto", "blockchain", and "token". As expected, the search volume of these keywords is positively correlated with the upward trend of the market.
However, these searches do not reveal the intent. To better understand user interest, it is helpful to closely examine intent-based searches.
Historically, the main uses of cryptocurrencies have been trading, investing, and speculation. Following closely are airdrops, but not as popular as the recent surge in keywords like "trade" and "invest". Nevertheless, passive income remains a topic of interest for crypto-savvy users.
2. Trading-related Queries
Since we are discussing trading, let's delve deeper and explore user brand awareness and key entry points.
The level of user attention to CEX (centralized exchanges) and DEX (decentralized exchanges) topics reflects the dominance of CEX trading volume over DEX. Despite various perspectives, DeFi is still a small part of the broader crypto market, where centralized exchanges like Binance are not to be underestimated.
Key observations:
- The popularity of CEX peaked in late December 2019 and dropped to a low in mid-March 2021.
- Binance has consistently maintained a leading position in the search interest for top centralized exchanges since 2024.
- The interest in DEX dropped to a low in the summer of 2021 but reached a historical high in late November 2024. This may be driven by a new Bitcoin bull market and the surge in meme coin activity on Solana DEXs.
- Among the leading DEXs by TVL, PancakeSwap dominated the search interest in May 2021. In December 2024, Uniswap was in the lead, followed by Raydium.
- The popularity of crypto derivatives peaked in 2021, but protocols like Hyperliquid have recently regained interest compared to Drift Protocol and Jupiter.
- Driven by discussions around Donald Trump on Polymarket, prediction markets spiked in November 2024 but quickly declined, reflecting a similar trend to November 2020.
3. Token Search Dynamics
The search interest in "crypto" is only comparable to "Bitcoin", the primary query term associated with crypto-related topics.
The search interest in Bitcoin peaked during the 2021 bull market and reached its lowest point in late 2019. Even after Bitcoin reached $100,000 for the first time in late 2024, it has not been able to regain its former popularity.
Meanwhile, the query frequency for other top market cap tokens, including Ethereum, has remained relatively stable, although XRP has seen a significant increase following its recent rebound.
4. Narrative Hype
When comparing user interest in major verticals (such as DeFi, RWA, DePIN, GameFi, and the recently popular AI x Crypto), the first two verticals have sustainable user interest. In contrast, the others are more dependent on hype.
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in the RWA and AI x Crypto domains, while DePIN, DeFi, and GameFi remain secondary.
The popularity of meme coins has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, AI-related tokens are gaining attention, with March 2024 being a key moment.
5. Key Terms in 2024
Now that we have a general understanding of the current interest in Web3 and the main focus areas, let me share the most popular search queries in the crypto space (ranked by search volume).
- Bitcoin - the unbeatable attention magnet
- Ethereum
- DEX
- CEX
- L1 and L2 - evenly matched
- DeFi
- Altcoin
- RWA
- AI Agent
- Memecoin
- DePIN
- NFT
- GameFi
- Metaverse
Here is the ranking of the largest Web3 brands:
- Bitcoin
- XRP
- TON
- Binance
- Ethereum
- Solana
- USDT
- TRON
- Bybit
- Metamask
- OKX
All other brands, including those frequently discussed on Crypto Twitter, such as Vitruals, Ethena, or any L2 chain, are far behind the above-mentioned brands.
What can we see?
Most of the topics discussed on Crypto Twitter do not reach a global audience. Retail investors are still joining the crypto world through centralized exchanges, while DeFi only captures a small portion of crypto interest. Many of the current hype brands are still outside the retail investor's line of sight.
