Recent Google search data shows that more people appear to be interested in blockchain technology than digital currencies. According to Google Trends, an increasing number of users are searching for “blockchain” related topics.
In July of 2018, there were more searches for the term “blockchain” than “cryptocurrency”.
Since September, there have been more people looking for more information on blockchain than cryptocurrency. However, bitcoin (BTC) is still “king” as there are far more searches every month for the pseudonymous cryptocurrency than any other crypto-related term.
Many Uses Cases For DLT: Blockchain Internet Of Things (BIOT)
In fact, the word “Bitcoin” is searched almost 10-times more than “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency.” Before cryptocurrency prices skyrocketed during 2017, there were about the same number of Google searches for blockchain and cryptocurrency each month.
Since the past five years, there seemed to be as many people interested in cryptocurrency related news as the latest developments in the blockchain industry. As CryptoGlobe reported in late July, there will be a $254 billion market for the Blockchain Internet of Things (BIOT) by 2026 – according to Aftrek Market Research, a New York-based consulting firm.
Similar to other innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and the internet-of-things (IoT), blockchain technology potentially has more use cases than cryptocurrency.
Buterin Explains Why Blockchain Became Popular
However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out in September of 2017 (while speaking to AngelList CEO and co-founder, Naval Ravikant, at TechCrunch’s Disrupt San Francisco Conference), that most people did not realize that blockchain technology could be used to improve other business processes – and not be limited to being used only for implementing an “electronic cash system.”
In 2018, it seems that an increasing number of organizations and thought leaders have started to explore the potential use cases for blockchain, the digital distributed ledger on which most crypto platforms are implemented.
As CryptoGlobe covered, Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, said that he believes blockchain technology has “huge potential”, and his organization is looking to adopt it for its internal operations.
Kim explained that the World Bank’s researchers explored the use cases for cryptocurrency, however, the international financial institution’s management thinks that distributed ledger technology (DLT) has significantly more potential.
Kim noted that in August, the World Bank launched the very first blockchain-based bond where it “created, allocated, transferred, and managed the entire bond through” the distributed ledger.
Google Trends Only Show “Relative Popularity”
Notably, Google Trends’ analysis is not based on the actual number of searches for “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” as it only shows the relative popularity of these words.
As Google explains: “The resulting numbers are … scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.”
