Data from Google’s search trends suggest retail interest in bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies could be waning.

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price surge to as much as $69,000 last year and a range above $40,000 this year has failed to attract continual interest from retail crowds, search data from Google Trends suggests.

Worldwide searches for bitcoin have reached mid-2020 levels as of April 22, 2022, with readings of 17 for the week of April 17-April 23. This is a relative drop from May 2021’s readings of 76.

Google Trends allows users to compare the relative volume of searches. This, however, does not mean the total number of searches for that term is decreasing, but just means its popularity is decreasing compared to other searches. A line trending downward means that a search term’s popularity relative to other popular terms is decreasing.

Data suggests most searches for bitcoin originate from Nigeria, followed by El Salvador and Austria. These search queries are relative to other terms or keywords searched in those regions, meaning Nigerians searched for bitcoin more than they searched for other keywords, but this wasn’t necessarily more than overall search figures from, say, the U.S.

But despite the apparent waning interest in bitcoin, some analysts say retail crowds are gravitating towards newer sectors and markets within the crypto space, such as tokens of decentralized finance (DeFi) or layer 1 blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche.

“Bitcoin has risen in price several times, with its investment threshold becoming higher for new users,” explained Johnny Lyu, CEO of KuCoin, in a Telegram message. “But many new cryptocurrencies known as altcoins have appeared since, which, according to users, can be more attractive as investments.”

Lyu added the quick presence and popularity of memecoins have gradually shifted users’ attention from bitcoin in comparison to the past few years.

Egor Volotkovich, the executive director of cross-chain solutions EVODeFi, seconded that sentiment. “DeFi, NFT, and blockchain gaming are areas of interest that are now enticing investors across the board,” he said.

“Retail investors are more interested in exploring these other innovations the blockchain ecosystem now offers, which explains the declining search trends irrespective of the price differentials between now and the past two years,” Volotkovich added.

Meanwhile, some like Vasja Zupan, president of crypto exchange Matrix, argue the search data does not represent interest from institutional investors.

“Google Trends do not reflect institutional and professional interest. And I believe that current priceas reflect those groups’ interest and entering the market more than pure retail,” he said in an email to CoinDesk. “With Bitcoin maturing we will see a less retail impact, with exception of times of peak bull cycles and more influence from institutional demand,” Zupan added.

Firms like business analytics maker MicroStrategy and electric carmaker Tesla have purchased billions of dollars worth of bitcoin in the past two years, unlike previous cycles in 2018 and earlier.

Bitcoin was trading at just over $40,500 at writing time and is down 2.5% in the past 24 hours, data from CoinGecko show.

The post Retail Interest in Bitcoin is Dwindling, Google Data Suggests appeared first on Crypto Insider.

The Google Cloud team has officially made the Ethereum (ETH) dataset available in BigQuery, the company’s big data warehouse for analytics, according to a post published on Google’s official blog August 29.

The Ethereum blockchain data is posted in the dataset and updated on a daily basis. As the team explains, the tool was created to help make business decisions, prioritize improvements to the Ethereum architecture itself (for example, to prepare updates), and balance sheet adjustments, e.g. how quickly a wallet can be rebalanced.

As Google explains, the Ethereum blockchain contains APIs for random functions such as checking transaction status, looking up wallet-transaction associations, and checking wallet balances. Still, the API endpoints cannot be easily reached. For that reason, BigQuery’s OLAP features help aggregate such types of data and and visualize it.

Furthermore, the software based on Google Cloud synchronizes the Ethereum blockchain to computers running Parity — a UK-based provider of infrastructure software for interacting with the Ethereum network, which performs a daily extraction of data from the Ethereum blockchain ledger and stores date-partitioned data to BigQuery for exploration.

Google also shows some examples of the uses of the new tool. One of them relates to CryptoKitties — a game based on the Ethereum blockchain that is the most popular ERC-721 smart contract by transaction count. BigQuery collects data on accounts that own at least 10 CryptoKitties (a color on the graphics indicates owner) and their mascots’ reproductive fitness (size).

Google has already expanded into blockchain-based tools and services this year. In February, the company created a similar tool for the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain to visualize transactions, detect anomalies, and extract necessary data from the blockchain ledger.

As Cointelegraph wrote in July, Google also partnered with two blockchain-focused firms, Digital Asset and BlockApps, to offer new distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions on Google’s Cloud Platform.

The post Ethereum Blockchain Dataset Added To Google’s Big Data Analytics Platform appeared first on Crypto Insider.