What is Toncoin & How to Buy TON in India?
Unveiling the Potential of Toncoin: The Decentralized Powerhouse In the…
24 May 2024
| 10 min read
The year of 2022 for the world of crypto has been a very tumultuous one, undoubtedly lead by the hard-hitting and raging bear market that began immediately after the end of the bull run between November and December 2021 and went on all through the year. However, the year has also been very important for the world of crypto primarily because of the fact that it became more and more well known amongst the masses. General people began to hear and learn more about this, widespread adoption slowly began to take off.
Crypto wasn’t anymore a concept that was known to a select few techies and cryptographic savants, it was more of a solution to a problem that existed in the real world. It proposed a means by which one could look at the current world of business and finance and make it more decentralized and open.To start things off, let us take an example by analysing a Google Search Trends report for 2022 of the two most commonly occuring words in this ecosystem – crypto and Bitcoin. Crypto and Bitcoin have been more or less synonymous for each other for a better part of this industry’s brief history since its inception, and rightfully so. Bitcoin’s introduction in 2008 – it brought into the world a novel concept that we now term as cryptos.
As depicted by the legend above, blue line marks “Bitcoin” while the red line indicates the search trend for “crypto”. From the chart above, we can clearly see how Bitcoin has still dominated the search trend all through the year of 2022, coming in well above the trend for even the word crypto – clearly affirming how the Bitcoin is not just synonymous to everything crypto, but it represents crypto at large.
But the more pertinent observation from the chart above is that, the trend for both these crucial search terms have been on the downslide all through the year of 2022. We had see major spikes in both these search terms through the months of May and June – which was around the time when the first major crash of the year came post the collapse of the Terra LUNA ecosystem and the depegging of its algorithmic stablecoin, UST.
It was one of the largest loss of value from the market at that point in time, since LUNA was a top 15 market cap crypto and its collapse within a matter of days sucked out nearly $60 billion out of the crypto market. Then again towards the end of the year – when the FTX crypto exchange collapse took place, we see a spike in the search trends for the two most universally known words for this nascent industry. This indicates how this industry is still news-led and there is still a long way to go for true mass adoption and growth in the space.
However, that is not to say that the trends have gone away completely. While retail participation in the crypto market may have gone down significantly, interests have not dissipated completely! According to a report from Accenture called ‘Payments Get Personal Report’ shows that interests have remained strong despite the 2022 bear market and the subsequent crash. The reasons cited by responders in the report include long-term investments (28%), curiosity (22%), short-term speculation (21%) and others.
Additional Read: Top Cryptos that crashed more than 70 percent in 2022
At the same time, another research report by a popular personal finance portal DollarGeek – took a deep dive into the most searched cryptos worldwide and presented a idea on what the masses were thinking about and might be interested in investing in going forward into 2023.
Crypto |
US Search Volumes (monthly) |
Global Search Volumes (monthly) |
| Bitcoin (BTC) | 4.57 million | 28.41 million |
| Shiba Inu (SHIB) | 1.29 million | 4.43 million |
| Dogecoin (DOGE) | 729,000 | 5.85 million |
| Ethereum (ETH) | 611,000 | 3.84 million |
| Avalanche (AVAX) | 534,000 | 861,000 |
| Litecoin (LTC) | 269,000 | 796,000 |
| Cardano (ADA) | 247,000 | 1.47 million |
| Ripple (XRP) | 237,000 | 1.3 million |
| Safemoon | 178,000 | 1.03 million |
| Nexus (NXS) | 175,000 | 734,000 |
According to this report, Bitcoin by far has had the largest search volumes of all cryptos by a very large margin. This isn’t surprising, and is evident from the Google Search Trend chart attached above. Bitcoin’s US monthly search volumes have been more than thrice that of the second position on the list – held by Shiba Inu, while its monthly global search volumes are over 6 times than of the second position on that list, held by Dogecoin.
Shiba Inu has been the surprise contender on this list, with its US monthly search volumes surpassing Dogecoin by a large margin. SHIB’s US monthly search volumes were about 80% higher than that of Dogecoin’s. However, on the global search trends front – Dogecoin was back above Shiba Inu’s numbers by a decent margin – thus indicating that these memecoins have been on top of people’s minds all through this year.
Ethereum has bagged the fourth position overall in the search term trends and the interest in this particular crypto has remained more or less consistent, backed by strong interest in the highly anticipated Ethereum Merge that successfully went live on the 15th of September 2022. Take a look at this chart below.
Interest in the keywords “ethereum” and “merge” in 2022 | Source: Google Trends
In fact, the search trend for the Merge managed to be stronger in the month of September, outranking even ‘Ethereum’ as a search term! Alongside that, the average for the term ‘merge’ has been greater than the average of the term ‘ethereum’ for the year 2022 too. This goes on to show how much people were actually interested in the Ethereum Merge, and how anticipated and important it was in the world of crypto.
Cardano snapped up the fifth place in the global monthly search volumes but lost out to Avalanche and Litecoin in the US – which indicates that it might have been more productive in its efforts outside the country and on a global scale. And especially with the Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork going live on the network just a week away from the Ethereum Merge – it snapped up a lot of attention too.
Thus overall, these were some of the top cryptos that garnered the most attention amongst folks, both within and outside the crypto community at large. We are yet to see how the year of 2023 is going to perform and how it might turn out. If we see an end of the bear run, we could see the overall trends to improve as more retail and institutional interest and investments can make their way back into this asset class.
Read more: Top Blockchain Projects 2023