Short answer - no.
The Cryptocurrency most frequently searched for online is Bitcoin, with an average of almost 5 million searches per month.
To find out, we used a tool called Keyword Finder, which allowed us to view the search volumes for different types of Cryptocurrencies each month.
In this study, we looked at the search volume for 5 of the most well-known, widely used Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, XRP (Ripple), Litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
The results showed that the most popular type of Cryptocurrency currently searched for worldwide is Bitcoin, accounting for around two thirds of searches. This was then followed by Bitcoin Cash, XRP (Ripple), Litecoin and Ethereum.
| Cryptocurrency | Average no. of monthly searches (worldwide) |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 4,977,598 |
| XRP (Ripple) | 673,000 |
| Litecoin | 368,000 |
| Ethereum | 301,481 |
| Bitcoin Cash | 1,333,571 |
For Different Types of Cryptocurrencies the Most?
The country most frequently searching for all types of Cryptocurrencies is the USA.
We took a look at search volume data from 10 of the world’s most populated countries to discover which types of Cryptocurrencies are searched for the most.
The charts below show the search volume for each type of Cryptocurrency from a range of different countries.
The number on the vertical axis refers to the average number of searches per month made for each specific keyword over the past year.
As you can see, the country searching for ‘Bitcoin’ the most is the United States, with an average of 1.2 million searches being made for the term each month. The next highest number of searches for Bitcoin come from Brazil, with almost half a million searches being made per month. Germany closely follows with 370,000 monthly searches for Bitcoin.
Next, we focused on searches for ‘XRP’ (also known as Ripple). Again, the country with the highest number of searches is the USA, averaging at around 17,000 searches for the term every month. Japan’s interest in XRP also appears to be significant, with 6,600 monthly searches.
Considerably more searches for ‘Litecoin’ came from the USA than from any of the other countries involved in our study, with the average number of monthly searches from the States amounting to over 200,000. There were significantly fewer searches made for this term than for the other types of Cryptocurrency, with 14,800 searches from Brazil and just 12,100 from India.
The search volume for yet another type of Cryptocurrency, ‘Ethereum’, mainly come from the USA with 74,000 searches made each month. Interestingly, people in India appear to search for ‘Ethereum’ rather frequently too, with 27,100 searches per month.
Bitcoin cash is one of the less popular types of Cryptocurrency in this list. As with the above currencies, the USA account for the overwhelming majority (43,214) of the searches made for ‘Bitcoin cash’ each month.
This chart shows the proportion of cryptocurrency hashtags used on Instagram. As you can see, Bitcoin holds the largest proportion, with #Bitcoin having been used over 8.5 million times. The second most popular is Ethereum, followed by Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and XRP.
One of the most obvious findings of this investigation was that of Bitcoin’s popularity, and the population’s growing interest in this form of Cryptocurrency.
But why are so many more people interested in Bitcoin compared to other types of currency?
To find out, we consulted Bobby Ong, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency evaluation site CoinGecko and curator of the Cryptocurrency newsletter, Altcoin weekly.
“It [Bitcoin] is the first decentralized cryptocurrency and has the largest network effect”, says Bobby.
“The first altcoin, Ripple (XRP), was only launched two years after Bitcoin was created which is one of the many reasons why all other Cryptocurrencies are not as popular or valuable when compared to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is also pretty much the de facto reserve currency for all Cryptocurrencies, thus boosting its value even further.”
There are some important caveats to note from our investigations. The first of which being the meaning behind the search terms we investigated. It is possible that the purpose of some of the searches in the data we collected may not have been related to Cryptocurrencies, as the names of some Cryptocurrencies may overlap with unrelated search intents.
It’s also important to note that there are a number of considerations in this investigation that were not taken into account.
We excluded Iran from this study as their population’s search volume data is currently unavailable. In addition, it must be noted that Google is not China’s primary search engine, and unfortunately, we were unable to obtain the figures from their leading search engine Baidu. Therefore, our search volume dataset for this country also had to be omitted from the study.
