Analyzing Retail Interest in Crypto
Let’s explore some social stats to determine retail interest in cryptocurrencies
Hey DEFI TIMES community,
On-chain metrics are awesome tools to determine the crypto market sentiment. Is the on-chain activity in a downtrend? Are people in profit or at a loss? You can get a good feeling of whether the market is overheated or not.
In contrast to technical analysis, on-chain stats tell us the truth! While technical analyses only consider previous price developments, on-chain stats give us insights into what’s actually happening behind the scenes. Everything is transparent on a blockchain, which is why you see every single metric: ranging from the most prominent players to the little guys.
But as always, on-chain analyses should only be part of your research. You don’t see the full picture!
In fact, sometimes it’s also important to look off the chain. What’s happening in the real world?
That’s what we do today: We analyze crypto social stats, especially what’s happening on social media. That gives us a good insight into actual crypto interest.
Are people looking to get into crypto? Or is attention lagging behind its previous highs?
In that sense, let’s explore some social stats to determine retail interest in cryptocurrencies!
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Analyzing Retail Interest in Crypto
Google Search Volume
By far the best way to determine whether a lot of new people are researching cryptocurrencies is by checking Google-related searches.
The most accurate data provides Google Trends, which is Google’s analytics tool for search volume. With Google Trends, we can analyze the Google search volume for specific keywords. However, the website doesn't show absolute numbers but instead relative changes.
Google Trends gives us a good feeling of how many new people are joining the industry. Whenever someone searches for “Bitcoin,” they obviously want to learn more about it.
Let’s analyze search volume for the following keywords:
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Coinbase
Uniswap
NFT
As you can see, search volume for all keywords has drastically decreased during the last few weeks. While Bitcoin has by far the highest search volume, all other keywords look relatively small.
Bitcoin search traffic reached a high in mid-May, but it never crossed the all-time high from the peak in 2017. Since May, Google's search interest has fallen by more than 70%.
All other keywords seem pretty much correlated.
Tweet Volume
Another interesting metric to look at is the tweet volume. The tweet volume shows how many people tweet/talk about a specific topic on Twitter: In this case, cryptocurrencies.
In contrast to Google Search volume, this gives us insights into how active the existing community is. Why would anyone be active on Crypto Twitter if they didn’t know about it in the first place?
Now, let’s compare tweet volume for Bitcoin and Ethereum:
As you can see, the same applies here. The activity of community members continues to shrink in the past weeks; even though we are still up significantly year-to-date.
In mid-May, we reached an impressive number of almost 1,000,000 Bitcoin tweets per day. This number has gone down by almost 50%, which is now sitting at 471,000 tweets per day - still good!
Ethereum is still lagging behind in tweet volume. Only 184,000 tweets per day contain the word “Ethereum.”
New Weekly Crypto Exchange Twitter Followers
Another interesting metric is how many new Twitter followers popular crypto exchanges get. This should be pretty much correlated with the activity on crypto Twitter.
In fact, new weekly Twitter followers for crypto exchanges are at the lowest point in months. The last time the numbers were this low was in January 2021 - just before the start of the bull run!
Activity on Twitter has consolidated and we are in a clear downtrend.
Crypto Apps Ranking in the US App Store
Another off-chain metric determining retail interest is the ranking of crypto apps in the US App Store. Why? Because it shows how often these apps are downloaded. The more downloads, the better the ranking.
Cashapp and Coinbase seem to be the dominant crypto apps. Cashapp is a mobile payment service developed by Square, while Coinbase is probably the largest crypto exchange in the world.
While Coinbase has lost significant market share, Cashapp has stabilized its position on place 14 in the app store.
Conclusion
All important off-chain metrics indicate that overall interest in cryptocurrencies is falling. That’s what we would expect when prices go down?
Fewer people are entering the market and retail interest is falling!
When can we expect this to change? Well, no one knows!
Let’s see what the future holds!
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DISCLAIMER: All information presented above is meant for informational purposes only and should not be treated as financial, legal, or tax advice. This article's content solely reflects the opinion of the writer, who is not a financial advisor.
Do your own research before you purchase cryptocurrencies. Any cryptocurrency can go down in value. Holding cryptocurrencies is risky.