Ethereum Google searches within the United States have more than doubled from 9 to now 20, the highest level since March when eth’s price stood at around $800.

While worldwide Google searches have risen recently to now near May levels, with it increasing in the past two weeks to 17, up from 11.

Although small increases have previously been seen, the recent spike in searches for ethereum is the highest since December.

As can be seen above, for much of this year there has been a downtrend, which has somewhat stabilized in the recent months.

August, however, has a sharp spike, with the reason remaining unclear except perhaps that ethereum’s price has fallen so much to the point it might now be piquing interest.

The story worldwide is much the same, with Kosovo, Slovenia and Macedonia leading, but they are all tiny Balkan countries, as is Asia’s Singapore. China, however, has been dominating for some time.

Crypto exchanges have been banned in China, but we suspect there is something going on there, with eth at the center of it as far as cryptos are concerned.

First, a number of crypto to crypto exchanges have proliferated in Asia with most seemingly targeting China. There is even one exchange that offers the ETH/CNY pair. Quite a rarity.

Secondly, awareness is clearly growing in China. Among many things, they have used ethereum’s blockchain to protect documents that detail certain scandals for history to see.

Third, China has been dominating Solidity searches now for months. They are clearly learning how to code smart contracts and out of it have come some fun and games.

That includes the Fomo3d clone, which at one point was responsible for using some 30% of ethereum’s capacity.

In combination with many of the blockchain projects going there which are predominantly eth based, with some of them supported by the Chinese government, it appears natural that interest would increase.

In contrast, for bitcoin the flat line continues. You will notice the very grey China. They appear to have no interest in bitcoin at all.

The predictive quality of this data is unknown, but it is a somewhat objective indicator of the current and potential future user growth, with price and searches tending to correlate.

Whether it is a leading or a lagging indicator is unclear, but if it is lagging you would have expected eth’s price to double, rather than halve recently.

Which suggests what might be happening is that more people, especially in the world’s second biggest economy but also in US, are just learning about eth with some of them then potentially deciding to have some of it.

So logically you would think it would be a leading indicator, at least slightly, with another interesting stat being the amount of eth sent in and out of exchanges.

A negative balance means more eth has been withdrawn than sent to exchanges. As such, the above data by Santiment shows some 66,000 more eth have been taken out of exchanges than sent to them for today.

That’s one of the highest level since June, with the spike there in May preceding a price fall at the time. That’s because if more people are sending to exchanges than withdrawing, then presumably more people are selling, thus putting pressure on price.

On the other hand, if more are withdrawing, then presumably more are buying and then send their eth to some cold wallet or Ledger hardware.

One such inflow balance data point, however, might not be sufficient data, but it does look like, at least from mid-July, there was an uptrend of more people sending to exchanges, with that now seemingly reversing in the past few days.

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