US Google users show more interest in Ripple

5 years ago - Published in Fintech Land

According to Google Trends last year, the number of US users searching for the term, “how to buy Ripple” was greater than the number using the popular search engine to query “how to buy Bitcoin”. However, Google users interested in cryptocurrency from outside the US searched more frequently for information regarding taking up a position in the current number one digital asset by market capitalisation than they did for buying XRP.

Likewise, just the term “Bitcoin” outperformed “XRP” or “Ripple” both globally and in the US. Therefore, the long-awaited “flippening” that XRP fans are calling for might have to wait a little longer yet.

For advocates of and investors in Ripple’s XRP, it is only a matter of time before the bank-friendly token replaces Bitcoin as the leading digital asset by market capitalisation. Those who form the hardcore XRP fan base can be seen all over Reddit and Twitter denouncing Bitcoin as now-dated technology.

For them, BTC is a lumbering dinosaur of a crypto when compared to its competitors. Based on the potentially increased utility many more transactions per second provide, large numbers of folks are banking on XRP one day outperforming Bitcoin in terms of market capitalisation.

Whilst the controversial XRP currency is still a long way behind Bitcoin in terms of total size of market, there is one metric that Ripple appears to be somewhat outperforming Bitcoin on – US Google interest.

Twitter user and former engineer at Coinbase, Preethi Kasireddy, highlighted earlier today that, according to Google Trends, the phrase “how to buy Ripple” was more frequently searched than “how to buy Bitcoin” amongst US users of the search engine during the course of 2018.

Kasireddy’s Tweet is somewhat misleading since it makes no mention of the fact that it is based only on US Google users. When the entire planet is taken into account, “how to buy Bitcoin” far outperforms “how to buy Ripple”. In fact, more than seven times as many searches were made regarding taking up a position in Bitcoin as they were for the XRP equivalent during the year in question.

A basic reading of these figures might suggest that Ripple’s XRP is now more popular amongst the cryptocurrency community based in the US. However, this appears not to be the case. When the search terms “Bitcoin” and “Ripple” are compared using the analytics software, BTC comes out on top for number of searches occurring during 2018 both locally in the US and globally.

Despite growing numbers of bank partnerships, positive news regarding exchange listings, and trending hard in US Google searches, the blockchain company Ripple’s digital token, XRP, has been losing value versus Bitcoin during 2019. On January 1, a single XRP token would buy around 0.00009439 BTC. Today, a single XRP is worth just 0.00007350 BTC. Evidently, those expecting to see a flippening between XRP and Bitcoin will have to wait a little while longer at least.

NewsBTC reported that the XRP Army hopes that XRP will be able to replace BTC in terms of market cap. The online publication explains that “those who form the hardcore XRP fan base can be seen all over Reddit and Twitter denouncing Bitcoin as now-dated technology.”

But XRP is still way behind BTC in terms of market cap these days so we’ll probably have to wait for more in order to see if such a thing is possible.

What Ripple has been more focused on these days is promoting the adoption of its solutions and XRP has been enjoying more listings, and it’s been used by more financial entities to send money across borders.