The crypto craze is sweeping the general public as observers said President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to debut a memecoin has flipped the Overton window, bringing digital assets to the mainstream.
Google Trends, a widely used tool to gauge general or retail interest in trending topics, is currently returning a value of 100 for the worldwide search query “how to buy crypto.” The final figure for the week will be confirmed Saturday.
A score of 100 represents peak popularity – the maximum number of searches observed for the query during a given time frame, in this case, five years. It’s a sign that more and more people are scanning the web for information on how to take exposure to cryptocurrencies.
Google Trends provides access to a primarily unfiltered sample of search requests made to Google and scales their searches on a range of 0 to 100, according to the company. The search value represents the search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the selected region and time.
Note that the spike in search queries does not necessarily promise an actual increase in the buying pressure, as investors often don’t act.
That said, a value of 100 for the search query “how to buy crypto” shows that retail investors are eager to enter the market.
The excitement is understandable, as Donald Trump, the incoming President of the U.S., is expected to create a strategic bitcoin reserve, just like the oil reserve, while declaring crypto as a national policy priority. Trump could hint at these plans during his speech later Monday if rumors are to be believed.
Over the weekend, Trump and his wife Melania launched their respective memecoins, TRUMP and MELANIA, which quickly zoomed to several billion dollars in market capitalization.
According to some analysts, Trump’s decision to debut his memecoin has flipped the “Overton widow,” meaning what was once considered a fringe, has now entered the mainstream.
“If everything is now legal[1], many startups will try raising funds by issuing tokens as explicit crypto equity. As a context, the SEC distorted the market for the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there is nothing *morally* wrong with moving equity from spreadsheets and NASDAQs to blockchains,” Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, said on X.
The Overton Window is a theory for understanding how societal ideas change over time and influence politics. It represents the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.
Pseudonymous analyst Trevor.btc said that Trump’s memecoin move has set the stage for crypto deregulation in the U.S.
“The $TRUMP memecoin just ripped the bandaid off and shifted the Overton Window for crypto deregulation in the US. Now’s the time to look towards areas of crypto hampered by regulation and shoot first, ask questions later,” Trevor said on X.
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