A new study has found that, in light of recent crypto crashes, scepticism of digital currency is on the rise while interest in investment is declining.
The report by data intelligence platform Similarweb has found that terms such as ‘is crypto a scam?’ and ‘crypto is a scam’ generated 353% more search volume than searches such as ‘how do I invest in crypto?’ and ‘cryptocurrency investing’.
The data also shows that not only are negative searches surrounding crypto far outweighing positive searches, but that positive searches are also in decline. Between April and May, searches for ‘investing in crypto’ dropped by 28.9%.
The market was sent into a nosedive by the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and stablecoin and is now widely acknowledged to be in a bearish phase.
The majority of traffic (96%) driven by the ‘investing’ topic was organic, which was true of virtually all of the ‘scam’ oriented search traffic.
Organic traffic winners on the ‘scam’ front were media sites like foxnews.com (32.5%), techradar.com (28%), nytimes.com (14%), globalnews.ca (9%) and time.com (5.5%). Each offers news of specific scams and advice on avoiding them.
In a related report, it was found that Celsius Network, the borrower and lender of cryptocurrency that recently announced a halt to customer withdrawals citing ‘extreme market conditions’, was among the top four companies buying paid search traffic within the past three months.
David Carr, author of the report and senior insights manager at Similarweb, said: “Does the more sceptical turn in search interest mean that crypto is over and done with? Of course not – but it does represent a rise in sceptical sentiment.
“Just as the DotCom boom and bust at the end of the 1990s cleared the decks of pretenders and made room for the rise of Amazon, Google, and other global network offerings that figured out how to offer real value on top of an internet domain, the survivors of the crypto crash could ultimately prove that the potential of cryptocurrency was real all along.”