As the search interest for the altseason declines on Google by over 50% over a week, market analysts and other experts in the crypto industry are doubting whether the altseason spike, which showed up just a week before the decline, was legitimate.
With the search term ‘altseason’, hitting a score of 100 on Google Trends before the decline to 45, market experts are apprehensive about the spike. Many are questioning whether the spike was organic or artificially driven.
One such person, Alex Kruger, an economist, reflects his doubts on the variance of the figures on the Google Trends, stating, “wonder if that spike was organic or manufactured via bots.” Stating reasons for his doubt, the economist wrote on X, “the spike is >2x bigger than the November one and 4x bigger than anything else before then, unusual given how little prices moved.”
What happened?
On August 13, the search term ‘altcoin season’, which signals 50 coins or tokens are performing better than Bitcoin, searched worldwide, hit a high search score of 100. This is an unprecedented value–at least in the last five years, according to Google Trends. This spike in altcoin season search came just a day after Bitcoin hit its new all-time high of $124K.
What do the analyst say about the spike?
A trading cycle analyst, who goes by the pseudonym Cristian Chifoi, attributed the spike on Google Trends to Coinbase and other central exchanges, and stated that the search increased due to these exchanges heavily promoting the term.
On X, the analyst wrote, “The term altseason was heavily promoted by Coinbase and other big CEX’es and their affiliates, so it makes sense to be Google searched in a broader fashion, but imo it is not a good read on the state of the crypto cycle.”
To get a clearer view about the altseason, the analyst looked at the search behavior of the crypto community during the previous cycle in 2021, based on the, then trending search term ‘crypto’. From December 2020 to April-May 2021, searches for “crypto” surged as people got excited about the market. However, come Oct-Nov 2021, the excitement dried while the prices were quite high and this signalled the end of the cycle.
So what does that mean in today’s context?
It means that we haven’t still reached the altseason as the “prices in crypto are still low, and also the BTC dominance is still elevated vs the May 2021 dominance bottom”. He stated, “I would be more worried reading this google trend search like 5-10x from bottom”
Chifoi stated the fact that an all pump, where all coins pumps, “can happen in a span of 1-2 months, and after that the google trend will form another complacency while prices remain elevated – that will be the most dangerous area to invest.”
