Author: Stacy Muur, Web3 researcher; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Bitcoin’s second decade is halfway through, and the 20th anniversary is not far away. During this period, the crypto world has also undergone unpredictable changes, influenced by market sentiment, strategies, and alternating bull and bear market cycles.

Despite these fluctuations, new users continue to enter the crypto world through various channels. Which of these are the most popular? Let’s explore the answers in this article.

In order to better understand the changes in user interests, I analyzed Google Trends over the past five years. This period covers bull and bear market cycles, providing an objective perspective.

People often search for general concepts such as "crypto (cryptocurrency)", "blockchain (blockchain)" and "token (token)". Unsurprisingly, search volume for these keywords is proportional to the market’s upward movement.

But these searches show no intent. To better understand user interests, it’s helpful to take a closer look at intent-based search.

Throughout history, the primary uses of cryptocurrencies have been for trading, investing, and speculation. Airdrops followed closely, but they were not as popular as the recently frequently searched keywords such as “trade” and “invest”. Still, passive income is a topic of interest to cryptocurrency-savvy users.

Since we are discussing transactions, let’s go one step further and gain a deeper understanding of user brand awareness and key entry paths.

Users’ attention to topics related to CEX (centralized exchange) and DEX (decentralized exchange) reflects that CEX trading volume is dominant compared to DEX trading volume. Despite the various opinions, DeFi is still a small part of the broader crypto market, and it is a part of the market where centralized exchanges like Binance cannot be underestimated.

Key Observations:

CEX’s popularity peaked in late December 2019 and hit a low in mid-March 2021.

Binance has been leading the search popularity of the top centralized exchanges in 2024.

Attention to DEX fell to a low in the summer of 2021, but reached an all-time high at the end of November 2024. This may be driven by a new bull run in Bitcoin and a surge in meme coin activity on Solana DEXs.

Among TVL’s leading DEXs, PancakeSwap dominated the search popularity in May 2021. In December 2024, Uniswap was in the lead, followed by Raydium.

Encrypted derivativesThe popularity of cryptocurrencies has peaked in 2021, but protocols such as Hyperliquid have recently seen renewed interest compared to Drift Protocol and Jupiter.

The prediction market surged in November 2024, driven by Trump-related discussions on Polymarket. However, the popularity dropped quickly, reflecting a similar trend to November 2020.

The search popularity of the word "crypto" is only equal to that of "Bitcoin (Bitcoin)", which is the main topic related to encryption. Query words.

Bitcoin’s search popularity peaked during the 2021 bull market and fell to its lowest point at the end of 2019. Even after Bitcoin reached a price of $100,000 for the first time in late 2024, it failed to regain its former popularity.

Meanwhile, the frequency of inquiries for other top market cap coins, including Ethereum, has remained relatively stable, although XRP has seen a significant increase following its recent rally.

When comparing user interests in major vertical fields (such as DeFi, RWA, DePIN, GameFi and the recently popular AI x Crypto), the first two fields User interest is sustainable. In contrast, other areas rely more on hype.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the RWA and AI x Crypto fields, while DePIN, DeFi and GameFi still take a backseat.

Meme coin’s popularity surged to unprecedented levels in late 2024. At the same time, artificial intelligence-related tokens are gathering attention, and March 2024 is a critical moment.

Now that we have a general understanding of the current interests and main attention projects of Web3, let me share the most popular ones in the encryption field. What search queries are there (sorted by search query volume).

Bitcoin—The Invincible Attention Magnet

Ethereum

DEX

CEX

L1 and L2— —Evenly matched

DeFi

Altcoin

RWA

AI Agent

Memecoin

DePIN

NFT

GameFi

Metaverse

The following are Ranking of the largest Web3 brands:

Bitcoin

XRP

TON

Binance

Ethereum

Solana

USDT

TRON

Bybit

Metamask

OKX

Searches for all other brands, including those frequently discussed on Crypto Twitter such as Vitruals, Ethena, or any of the L2 chains, lag far behind the above mentioned brands.

What can you see?

Most topics discussed on Crypto Twitter do not reach a global audience. Retail investors still join the crypto world through centralized exchanges, and DeFi captures only a small portion of crypto interest. Many of today’s popular brands are still beyond the radar of retail investors.