China’s go-to search engine, Baidu, is seeing a large volume of searches for Bitcoin, with the number 1 token in the market becoming the top trending keyword on the platform, CCN first reported.
Google also indicates a higher volume of searches for Bitcoin, coinciding with the recent rise to ~$5000 levels.
As to why the price spiked at all, no one is quite sure. Some have wondered if a bitcoin whale triggered algorithmic trades after a particularly large order, but that too is treated with a grain of salt.
Search engine volume for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have in the past been strongly correlated with price rise. The rise in value tends to attract more searches for the digital asset, which could represent investors who have been on the fence about investing following up on the market’s rise.
Studies have been conducted in the past that show social media dynamics – Tweets with “Bitcoin” in it or search engine volumes – are somewhat correlated with how the market performs.
Despite China’s relatively strict approach to regulation in the cryptocurrency space, the nation on the whole is taking formative steps when it comes to the whole matter. On the one hand, Security Token Offerings have now been limited to high-capital investors with $1 million or more, but on the other, China has been granting a lot of exposure to Bitcoin and the cryptoasset space by pitching the uses of blockchain and relevant literature on state channels that have a hundreds of million strong audience.
