On Monday (February 21), former Goldman Sachs executive Raoul Pal explained what data from Google Trends is saying about current trends in the crypto space.

Google Trends is “a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.” It “uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.”

Prior to founding macro economic and investment strategy research service Global Macro Investor (GMI) in 2005, Pal co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London for global asset management firm GLG Partners (which is now called “Man GLG”). Before that, Pal worked at Goldman Sachs, where he co-managed the European hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives. Currently, he is the CEO of finance and business video channel Real Vision, which he co-founded in 2014.

In the April 2020 issue of the GMI newsletter, Pal explained why he believes that Bitcoin, which he called “the future”, could one day have a $10 trillion valuation. In that issue, Pal said that the idea of a $10 trillion valuation for Bitcoin is not so crazy:

“After all, it isn’t just a currency or even a store of value. It is an entire trusted, verified, secure financial and accounting system of digital value that can never be created outside of the cryptographic algorithm… It is nothing short of the future of our entire medium of exchange system, and of money itself and the platform on which it operates.“

Since then, Pal has provided updates on changes to his crypto holdings. For example, on 29 October 2021, he said on Twitter that he was “irresponsibly long” Ethereum ($ETH).

He went on to explain what other types of cryptoassets he holds.

Well, yesterday, Pal tweeted about his findings from analyzing Google Trends data.

First, he talked about Bitcoin:

Next, he talked about Ethereum and DeFi.

With regard to Ethereum and Bitcoin, Pal believes that “ETH seems to be capturing the L1 element of the applications layer (sort of like the social token of the applications ecosystem)”, whereas “BTC as the base layer is less likely to see the rise in interest in this point in its adoption curve – more steady increases in adoption over time.”

As for DeFi, Pal says that “considering the TAM of its application, is likely to see much more interest over time” and that “we have only seen the first mini-wave.” He thinks the “real magic applications” will arrive when “TradFi goes on blockchain.”

This was followed by comments about NFTs and Web3.

With regards to these two, he pointed out that “the true consumer applications layer (Web 3.0 and NFT’s) are getting the most new interest and is what is really going to scale to the billions but split over millions of projects and areas (music, art, community, real estate, luxury goods, metaverse, etc).”

Finally, for those interested in a macro view of the financial markets, Pal mentioned that he thinks “we are getting really really close to a buy bonds, buy tech, buy crypto set up.”

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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