(Bloomberg) — Bitcoin played the “anti-hero” this week, stealing the spotlight from pop icons Taylor Swift and Beyoncé in Google search popularity.
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Bitcoin’s record-breaking rally has sent searches for the largest cryptocurrency to their highest point in over a year, attracting more US searches than the two music artists combined over the last week, according to Google Trends data.
Bitcoin has repeatedly set new all-time highs in recent days as investors pour into the digital asset. The approval of spot-Bitcoin ETFs in January, along with enthusiasm about the next halving event expected in late April, which will the cut the supply of newly mined Bitcoin in half, has helped attract a wave of new US investors to the asset. Still, search interest does not necessarily signal purchase intent. The last time Bitcoin saw this level of search interest was in June 2022, when the token dropped nearly 40% in a single week.
Over the Super Bowl weekend in early February, searches for Swift were 14 times higher than they were for Bitcoin. But, a March spike in search interest for the digital asset has quickly inversed that relationship, with Bitcoin seeing an average search rating of 53 in the last week, compared to Swift and Beyoncé, who had average search ratings of 38 and nine, respectively. Google Trends data does not display raw search numbers, but uses an index from zero to 100 to show relative search popularity.
A series of market setbacks and high-profile criminal cases has hurt retail interest in Bitcoin over recent years, mirroring some of the anxiety that Swift writes about in her “Anti-Hero” song from late 2022. Despite the token setting a new all-time high for five of the last seven days, search interest has still not hit the highs it saw back in 2021, when it reached its previous high.
Still, the collection of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds has seen nearly $12 billion of net inflows since their launch. Bitcoin was lower by 2.7%, after setting an all-time of $73,797 on Thursday.
(Adds the price change in the last paragraph. An earlier update corrected Bitcoin’s average search rating to 53 in the fourth paragraph.)
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