Main points
- Interest in cryptocurrency is 16.6% lower this year than the global average for 2021, according to Google data
- The fall in the price of Bitcoin this year is 52,7%, while layoffs and liquidations have hit the industry
- The largest decline in interest is recorded in the Netherlands (-37%), followed by Ireland and New Zealand
- The Central African Republic is bucking the trend and interest soared by 592% after its own government announced in April that Bitcoin would be a legal tender
- Other African countries – Morocco and Kenya – are next, with impressive increases of 61% and 55% of interest, respectively, compared to last year
- The interest of developing countries in cryptocurrencies is greater than that of developed countries, with many countries seeing an increase this year, despite the downturn
The crypto market went down sharply in 2022. The price of Bitcoin – which is no stranger to volatility – is currently 52% below the $47,700 level at which it was traded on New Year’s Day.
But it’s not just the prices that fluctuate. We have seen liquidations of major players as contagion increased – most notably the collapse of the former Top 10 coin, Luna, and the death spiral of the associated stablecoin UST in May, but also bankruptcy filings for crypto lenders Celsius and Voyager Digital, to name a few.
Unfortunately, there are also layoffs in the industry. None is more well-known than Coinbase, which laid off 18% of its employees (1,110) just a few months after it spent millions on a SuperBowl advertisement.
So we were curious – has interest dropped globally this year in response to the ending bull market hysteria? If so, in which countries has interest in cryptocurrencies declined the most?
Interest in cryptocurrencies will drop significantly in 2022
Interest has decreased by 16.6% worldwide, which is a rather sharp decline. The worst-case decline is in the Netherlands with 37%, followed by European countries Ireland with a decrease of 30% and New Zealand with 28%.
It is striking that the US is in second place with a decrease of over 26% compared to the search volume of 2021. Since the US still accounts for such a large part of the market volume, this symbolizes how much the market has changed today compared to last year and clarifies the background of the layoffs and the fall in prices that we have experienced.
Interestingly, the most stable countries in terms of interest in cryptocurrencies are mostly developing countries – Morocco, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Colombia are all among the countries where interest has actually increased. In Morocco and Kenya, the two African countries recorded an increase of 61% and 55% respectively.
Interest has dropped even further in the last month
The bear market has really taken off since May, when Terra went down, and the last few months have been brutal accordingly. Looking at the declines in July alone compared to the whole of 2022, the decline is even worse. The global average shows that there are 63% fewer searches for cryptocurrencies this month than the average in 2022.
New Zealand, Spain, Venezuela and – somewhat surprisingly – the US and Canada are all among the countries where interest has declined the most. Searches in the US have decreased by 59%, followed by Canada with 58%.
El Salvador
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, often tweets that his government “buys the dip” when the Bitcoin goes down. It seems that the citizens of his country, where Bitcoin has been legal tender since last year, are not of the same opinion.
According to Google search trends, interest in Bitcoin fell further in El Salvador in July than in any other country, compared to the figures of 2021. A decline in any form is to be expected given the increase in searches after the announcement of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021. However, a drop of 63% is worrisome and illustrates both the harmful effects of the bear market and the challenges of introducing Bitcoin to the population of El Salvador.
Overall, interest rates fell by 17.9% in 2022 compared to 2021, which is not quite as much as the decline in July (64%), but still a big decline.
Central African Republic
In the diagrams above, a country was not taken into account for scaling reasons. And this is because the Central African Republic completely defies these figures. Interest in cryptocurrencies increased by 715% in July-22 (592% for the whole of 2022) compared to the figures of 2021.
Of course, this is due to the fact that in April they became the second nation to declare Bitcoin a legal tender. Not only that, they even went further and announced the tokenization of the country’s rich resources (diamonds, uranium, oil) with a newly launched cryptocurrency “Sango Coin”.
But whether this is a smart initiative in one of the poorest countries in the world, where only 10% of the population has Internet access, is another matter.
