Losing Interest: Google Searches For DeFi and Bitcoin Fall

Interest in Bitcoin is declining and attention spans are shortening for the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), if Google trends data is anything to go by. 

Google Trends data works like this: Each search term is assigned a numerical value that provides an indication of its popularity. Taken with a pinch of salt, Google's data provides a rough indication of the world's interest in various facets of the cryptocurrency market.

In the first week of September, Google gave Bitcoin a 51/100 in terms of popularity, when compared against itself in the past year. (Bitcoin hit 100 in the middle of May, around the time of the Bitcoin halving). When Bitcoin's price slumped at the beginning of September,  so did interest in the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, to 41.

The interest stuck around that level ever since the price of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency by market cap stabilized in the past few weeks. 

How about DeFi, the shorthand for decentralized finance, this summer's Hot Big New Crazy Thing? Weirdly enough, interest in the search term peaked at the end of March, when Bitcoin was at its lowest ebb this year—its price crashed amid the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Then interest dipped in the following months until the first week of September, when it surged back to 99/100. Since then, it's fallen like a cheese wheel trundling down a hill, to 65/100. 

This is down to the DeFi explosion of this summer when investors poured billions of dollars into the latest cryptocurrency craze in a matter of months.

As interest in Bitcoin has remained relatively steady this year, one would expect worldwide interest in Ethereum to be booming (most DeFi projects are built on the platform). And it has increased—but modestly: by 11% since the start of the year.