Key Takeaways
Google search interest for Bitcoin hit near five-year lows in early August despite pro-crypto policies.A massive February selloff triggered the highest search interest over the past five years.Despite low online interest, a River report shows nearly 50 million Americans own Bitcoin, surpassing gold.
Interest in Bitcoin Drops to Near-Historic Lows in the US
While President Trump has put crypto front and center as part of his administration, this has not translated into an extended interest in bitcoin in the U.S., at least on the internet front.
According to Google Trends, a tool that helps to monitor how often specific terms are being searched across different areas, interest in bitcoin is near its all-time low numbers, even as cryptocurrency and crypto tangential themes, including prediction markets, have been getting mainstream attention since President Trump took office due to his crypto-friendly stance.
During the week ending August 1, Trends assigned a popularity of 18 to the bitcoin term, with similar numbers surpassed in October and September 2023 and in November 2022, when the crypto ecosystem had not reached the relevance it has today.
Conversely, Google Trends registers the first week of February as the period when interest in BTC peaked in the last five years. During that week, one of the largest selloffs in bitcoin history occurred, with BTC prices dropping 30% to near-$60K following a sharp tech sector drawdown.
Google Trends’ arbitrary numeric scale represents the search interest relative to the maximum value for the specified region and period. This means that searches for “bitcoin” dropped to less than a fifth of the February selloff figures, which was assigned the highest score (100).
These numbers come as the crypto ecosystem expects a cloture vote for the Clarity Act, an essential piece of crypto regulation, in the U.S. Senate this week, even when there is no confirmed bipartisan support for its passage. Also, a millionaire exploit on the Coldcard hardware wallet on Saturday, which resulted in the loss of over 1,300 BTC for the affected parties, failed to prop these numbers.
Nonetheless, according to a report by River, bitcoin recently overtook gold as the preferred investment asset in the U.S. The firm found that 49.6 million Americans – nearly a fifth of the adult population- hold BTC, while only 28.8 million own gold.
