Author: Stacy Muur, Web3 Researcher; Translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou
Bitcoin is halfway through its second decade, and the 20th anniversary is not far away. During this period, the crypto world has also undergone unpredictable changes, influenced by market sentiment, political strategies, and the alternation of bull and bear market cycles.
Despite these fluctuations, new users continue to enter the crypto world through various channels. What are the most popular among them? Let's explore the answer in this article.
To better understand the changes in user interests, I analyzed Google Trends over the past five years. This period covers bull and bear market cycles and provides an objective perspective.
People often search for general concepts such as "crypto", "blockchain", and "token". As expected, the search volume of these keywords is proportional to the upward trend of the market.
But these searches don’t reveal intent. To better understand user interests, it’s helpful to take a closer look at intent-based searches.
Throughout history, the main uses of cryptocurrencies have been trading, investing, and speculation. Airdrops followed closely behind, but not as popular as the recently frequently searched keywords such as "trade" and "invest". Despite this, passive income remains a topic of interest to crypto-savvy users.
Since we are on the subject of trading, let's take a step further and dive into user brand awareness and key entry paths.
User interest in topics related to CEX (centralized exchanges) and DEX (decentralized exchanges) reflects the dominance of CEX trading volume over DEX trading volume. Despite the various opinions, DeFi is still a small part of the broader crypto market, and centralized exchanges like Binance should not be underestimated in this part of the market.
Key Observations:
CEX’s popularity peaked in late December 2019 and fell to a low in mid-March 2021.
Binance has been leading in search popularity for the top centralized exchanges in 2024.
Attention on DEX fell to a low in the summer of 2021, but reached an all-time high in late November 2024. This was likely driven by Bitcoin’s new bull run and a surge in meme coin activity on Solana DEXs.
Among the leading DEXs by TVL, PancakeSwap dominated search interest in May 2021. In December 2024, Uniswap leads, followed by Raydium.
Crypto derivatives’s popularity peaked in 2021, but protocols like Hyperliquid have recently revived interest, compared to Drift Protocol and Jupiter.
Prediction markets surged in November 2024, driven by Trump-related discussions on Polymarket. However, the popularity quickly declined, reflecting a similar trend to November 2020.
The search popularity of the word "crypto" is only comparable to "Bitcoin", which is the main query term for crypto-related topics.
The search popularity of Bitcoin peaked during the bull run in 2021 and fell to its lowest point at the end of 2019. Even after Bitcoin reached a price of $100,000 for the first time at the end of 2024, it failed to regain its former popularity.
Meanwhile, query frequencies for other top market cap tokens, including Ethereum, remained relatively stable, although XRP saw a significant increase following its recent rally.
When comparing user interest in major verticals such as DeFi, RWA, DePIN, GameFi, and the recently popular AI x Crypto, user interest in the first two fields is sustainable. In contrast, other fields rely more on hype.
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in the RWA and AI x Crypto fields, while DePIN, DeFi, and GameFi remain in a secondary position.
The popularity of Meme coins soared to unprecedented levels at the end of 2024. At the same time, AI-related tokens are accumulating attention, and March 2024 is a critical moment.
Now that we have a general understanding of the current interest and major attention projects in Web3, let me share what are the most popular search queries in the crypto field at present (sorted by search query volume).
Bitcoin - The Unrivaled Attention Magnet
Ethereum
DEX
CEX
L1 and L2 - Evenly Matched
DeFi
Altcoin
RWA
AI Agent
Memecoin
DePIN
NFT
GameFi
Metaverse
Here are the biggest Web3 brands ranked:
Bitcoin
XRP
TON
Binance
Ethereum
Solana
USDT
TRON
Bybit
Metamask
OKX
Search for all other brands, including those frequently discussed on Crypto Twitter like Vitruals, Ethena, or any of the L2 chains, lag far behind the above brands.
What can you tell?
Most topics discussed on Crypto Twitterdo not reach a global audience. Retail investors are still joining the crypto world through centralized exchanges, andDeFi captures only a small portion of crypto interest. Many of today's hot brands are still beyond the sight of retail investors.
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