Written by: Tanya Petrusenko. Tanya has been in the industry since 2015 researching blockchain and crypto from both legal and entrepreneurial perspectives. Apart from that she has been working with numerous crypto projects helping them with marketing and advertising as a part of the Bitmedia team.
Last week was marked by a massive collapse of bitcoin price triggered by the fall on traditional markets due to the panic over the coronavirus. The chaos spread far beyond the financial world and as most of the population on Earth is now locked down, panic buying has gone over the top. Apart from extremely high interest in toilet paper and food, there is also an increasing interest in online products now.
The reason for that is, of course, the fact that people spend most of their time at home now, working or studying remotely, and this automatically makes them spend more time sitting at their computers. Naturally, online entertainment services get more attention, together with online communication tools and software to work from a distance and for e-learning.
Bitmedia, a crypto advertising platform, was one of the companies to feel the impact of the ongoing situation. The company took a closer look at crypto audiences during the lockdown, with a particular focus on statistics from Google Trends as well as from other open-source data sources. Upon conducting some analysis, the firm shared its insights regarding the current trends and happenings on the internet.
One of the key finding is the increased interest in the purchase of cryptocurrency as prices went down. Based on the information from Google Trends, the number of search requests to ‘buy bitcoin’ tripled as soon as the price went down (see chart).
This week as it can be seen there are less ‘buy bitcoin’ and ‘bitcoin’ queries on Google. Still, they have grown by more or less 30% compared to the number of search queries made before people started quarantining.
Moreover, according to information from Coinbase, the percentage of customers who are currently buying bitcoin increased to about 75% over the last week, whereas only 25% of Coinbase users were selling BTC.
This week, despite the price recovery, the trend remains the same and all of the top exchanges like Coinbase, LMAX, P2PB2B and others show that users are predominantly buying.
Source:Bitmedia
“When volatility increases in all major financial markets, large players tend to reduce their share of high-risk investments, such as cryptocurrencies. This was the underlying reason for the latest collapse in the bitcoin price. Retail buyers, on the contrary, are expecting inflation to go up soon, and hence are looking for ways to diversify their risks related to traditional banks and fiat money”. – said Matvey Diadkov, the CEO of Bitmedia.
When analyzing trends in countries that were heavily influenced by the COVID-19 outbreak, it becomes clear that people were bulk-buying food and basic-needs products, while also actively looking to invest in Bitcoin. The chart below shows how the trends and search requests for coronavirus (the blue line) and bitcoin (the red line) correlate with each other.
Source: Bitmedia
It is interesting to notice that in Austria, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, Bitcoin was trending almost as much as the coronavirus over the last week. In Germany, the number of Google searches were even higher at one point time.
Now, the number of searches has also decreased, compared to its peak, when the price dropped, but is still higher than before the lockdown started and BTC’s price dropped. The same trend can be also observed in the U.S., where the number of searches for bitcoin has increased, as more and more people started working from home.
Source: Bitmedia
Apart from seeing bitcoin as a potential investment, these trends also imply that people are spending more time at home and trying to find out some new information for themselves, which means it can be likely the crypto community will have more newcomers soon.
At the same time we can see that when panic levels dropped, there was still more interest in the crypto market than before.
Nevertheless, apart from the price trends, there are some other crypto market happenings connected with the coronavirus situation. According to data provided by the Bitmedia team, the number of visitors of crypto-related websites has increased 40% these last few days and has sustained that level.
When it comes to geos, Europeans are getting more and more active on crypto websites. Crypto-related businesses are also being more active and trying to take advantage of the current situation.
All in all, despite the price drop last week, the crypto market is currently showing positive signs. It seems that crypto community’s current mood, bitcoin’s market has more room to keep on growing,
There is no need to panic, bitcoin will prove itself during the instability in traditional markets and quantitative easing times. So stay safe, wash your hands and HODL.
Tanya Petrusenko
Head of Business Development, Bitmedia
