It doesn’t take a genius to know that people of different nations look for different things in crypto. The ChangeHero team believes can be refreshing to get acquainted with the perspective of the other because you can find something you would have missed in your bubble. Before April comes, let’s see what cryptocurrencies were trending in different countries and why.
Crypto Assets Trending in the US
Bitcoin (BTC)
Some things never go out of fashion. Bitcoin (BTC) is trending in all locations we have reviewed to date, which is pretty understandable. Plenty of crypto investors have no need to invest in other coins but Bitcoin, and they are not necessarily “Bitcoin maxis”.
Bitcoin remains a gauge for the state of the entire crypto economy because it still dominates by market capitalization. At the time of writing, the BTC dominance is at 44.9% (here and in the following instances according to CoinGecko). Overall, Bitcoin is trending globally, although it is far from being the coin with the highest search interest.
Arbitrum (ARB)
The coin that leads the global trending crypto ranking is a new but long-anticipated arrival on the market. In the US, it ranks below Bitcoin but it sees increased attention in other locations as well.
Thanks to the Arbitrum airdrop last week, the token is traded like hot pies. The downside to this popularity is that many of the airdrop receivers are looking to sell. Because of this, the ARB price is 84.37% down on the 7-day time frame — precisely when it first entered the market. In the shorter time frames, though, the picture is different, so for now, they can be more representative of the supply and demand dynamic in ARB.
XRP
The third pick of top trending cryptocurrencies for this region is also present in other local searches, although the overall interest in XRP is not that high. The US is closely following the XRP case because, to them, it can serve as a gauge of the regulation policies.
The sentiment at the moment is that the US government is cracking down on the crypto sector. Just last week, Binance has been sued by the CFTC, and Coinbase was served a Wells notice from the SEC. All the while, the SEC vs. Ripple case, which has been going on since 2020, seems to be closer to its resolution. For sure, it is going to have a positive impact on the XRP price.
Trending Cryptocurrencies in Brazil
Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE)
The top trending cryptocurrency for this South American country is none other than a… dog-themed meme coin which is not the largest by market cap even in its own breed?
Nevertheless, Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE) has frequently shown up on the Portuguese-speaking portion of YouTube last month with thousands of views. It is a small-cap coin, meaning it experiences more volatility, so its price swings are much more noticeable. Leveraged trading who?
Ethereum (ETH)
Across all reviewed locations, Ethereum (ETH) has seen the most attention from Brazilians, although it closes the top-10 trending cryptocurrencies globally.
Ether gets increased attention in the wake of April because of the Shapella upgrade, planned for April 12. “Shapella” comes from “Shanghai” and “Capella”, two upgrades for the execution and consensus layers of Ethereum, respectively. It is big Ethereum news because, after more than two years, the staked ETH withdrawals will be unlocked.
Should we expect any effect on the Ether price? We believe that momentarily, it can have the same effect as Bitcoin halving. The outflows of staked ETH are to be expected but the event is already priced in because it has been long in the picture. There is nothing to worry about for the liquid staking industry as well.
Shiba Inu (SHIB)
What we understand by now is that Brazil loves dog coins. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is another trending crypto token of this kind, although it is popular in other regions, too.
SHIB seems to rank lower than its lower-cap counterparts because for the time being it is outperformed by them. All the cards seem to be in favor of this changing soon: the burn rate accelerates, and the network activity spikes. These metrics usually precede the movement of the SHIB price but don’t stay in the picture for long.
Highlights of Trending Crypto in Indonesia
Bitgert (BRISE)
Coming in as the number 4 trending crypto asset in Indonesia, Bitgert (BRISE) seems to be in vogue here. This is another relatively small but growing blockchain platform, although it is way ahead in its social media presence than a market cap. In fact, the project’s official Twitter feed is a steady stream of announcements and collaborations with developers and companies.
No wonder the stream of BRISE news creates an impression that it is actively worked on. The project is not open-source, so there is no way to track actual developer activity. As far as the network activity goes, it is doing about as well as tokens of its scale: 1.5~2.5 thousand transactions daily with around a thousand of those being unique. Nevertheless, BRISE’s presence in the social media conversation makes users interested enough to look this token up.
SafeMoon (SFM)
This token is somewhat lower on the list than SHIB and BABYDOGE in Indonesia but it still seems to be popular enough. The investment rationale behind the SafeMoon (SFM) token looks to be the same as for the ones we mentioned: a low-cap altcoin that lets traders capitalize on volatility.
However, this time the search interest seems to have been caused by the negative SafeMoon news: its liquidity pool has been hacked and drained of ~$8.9M, causing the token to migrate to a new contract. The hacker reportedly replied to the official statement, claiming it was accidental and proposing to return the funds. All is well that ends well but so much for putting “safe” right in the name.
Solana (SOL)
Last but not least, among the altcoins we already covered, is a familiar name that seems to have somewhat gone off the radar. At least in Indonesia, a lot of investors are apparently still watching Solana (SOL) to the extent it made it to the list of the trending cryptocurrency in the region.
What has the Ethereum killer from the top ten been up to lately? The on-chain metrics for the past month have been consistently healthy (hooray to no outages!) with a noticeable growth in the number of fungible token contracts. The recent Solana news is overall moderately optimistic, describing ecosystem growth. For example, Solana-based decentralized applications will soon be available on the Cosmos network.
What crypto is trending in the Philippines?
Smooth Love Potion (SLP), Ronin (RON), Axie Infinity (AXS)
Despite taking up different ranks on the list of trending crypto assets in the Philippines, we will cover these three tokens in the same section. All of these tokens are from the Sky Mavis ecosystem and are directly related to the Axie Infinity play-to-earn game.
The extraordinary popularity of Axie Infinity in the Philippines has been a case study since at least 2021. The in-game assets are tokens tradeable on crypto exchanges, so in addition to having an in-game economy, the gameplay of Axie Infinity is also influenced by the crypto market economy. And since the most common fiat currency to be a common denominator there is the US dollar, when recounted into the Philippines peso, the rewards of the game had a high value.
Judging by the fact that not one or two of Axie Infinity’s crypto-represented assets made it to the trending crypto list but three, the game is still popular enough there to be a driver of attention paid to these tokens.
Polygon (MATIC)
Despite there being plenty of Polygon news this month, it seems to be most intently watched only in the Philippines. It somewhat goes against the trend that low-cap altcoins consistently make it to the trending cryptocurrency lists because Polygon (MATIC) is an established project that ranks 10th by market cap at the time of writing.
The scaling solution of Polygon has the advantage over Arbitrum because of its earlier release. Nevertheless, the pressure is on. What Arbitrum lacks at the moment is zero-knowledge EVM support, which Polygon Labs rolled out this March. The searches related to MATIC are growing because the traders want to see how the price reacts.
BNB
And finally, another major altcoin that users watch is BNB. A possible reason why BNB is one of the top trending cryptocurrencies in the Philippines is the mixed bag that the BNB news is.
On the one hand, there is no lack of positive developments in the BNB Chain ecosystem. Its largest DEX PancakeSwap is getting ready for a V3 release, and the Bicasso NFTs were met with overwhelming demand.
On the other hand, we have already mentioned that Binance has been sued by the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission and a bit later, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite the serious indictments cited in the lawsuit, the actual “crime” of the exchange is offering unregistered financial products to American investors and operating without proper registration. The case has only just begun, so it is hard to predict how it all plays out in the end.
Conclusion
What insights did we learn from reviewing the trends across different regions? Crypto markets are not as uniform as you may have thought, and the local context can be as important as the global one.
Let us know if you like this format of articles because depending on your valuable feedback it can become a series in our blog. What regions would you like to see us cover in the next one? Join the discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram, and subscribe while you’re at it
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