Around the world, the majority of searches related to cryptocurrency involve the word “Bitcoin,” a new report by ConsenSys concludes. Excepting a few Asian countries, most of the world wants to find information about Bitcoin. In the U.S., UK, Nigeria, Brazil, France, and elsewhere, roughly 70% or more of all crypto-related searches are for Bitcoin. Comparatively, Taiwan and Japan have an abiding interest in Ethereum, blockchain, and related cryptocurrency more broadly.
KEY MARKETS FOR DAPP DEVELOPMENT
ConsenSys, which was among the first companies to develop for Ethereum, needs the data to understand where key markets might be. While their report largely summarizes the data, the company goes out of its way to note the places with the most interest in its flagship blockchain:
“Countries in Asia like Japan and South Korea lead the world in interest for both ‘Blockchain,’ and ‘Ethereum’ and fittingly are developing a clued-in populous at the forefront of the blockchain ecosystem. Elsewhere in the world, countries like the United States and United Kingdom still represent strong Bitcoin dominance, although it’s Brazil that leads the pack in that regard.”
Bitcoin and blockchain are synonymous to many initially seeking information about cryptocurrency. While the two terms have essential differences, search spikes for any terms related to crypto generally coincide with gaining market trends.
As well documented, one of the first efforts to dismiss the crypto movement was for various central bankers and pundits to preach “blockchain, not Bitcoin.” This was an attempt to display financial wokeness without embracing an exceedingly disruptive movement. A blockchain is not secure unless its base token has value enough to incentivize its security.
“BLOCKCHAIN, NOT BITCOIN”? NAH.
No blockchain model is based on the idea that people will secure the network “for the public good.” Instead, in Bitcoin and Ethereum both, those providing that security are rewarded with transaction fees and base rewards.
There are, however, legitimate arguments that lend more credence to the blockchain technology as a whole, including but far from limited to Bitcoin.
One question that arises from these statistics is whether they’re a sign that the market as a whole is quite nascent. If the majority of people are searching strictly for “Bitcoin,” things are either only beginning or the maximalist vision of the future, in which there is Bitcoin and little else, is much more likely than one might think.
In the case of Venezuela, it’s interesting that Ethereum represented around 9% of all searches when people were definitively looking for alternative ways to secure their net worth. Bitcoin saw a 75% share of Venezuelan searches related to crypto, while “cryptocurrency” more generally accounted for only 2%. “Blockchain” did even worse than that, at 1%.
