Last year, Facebook rebranded its company name to Meta in a bid to pioneer the metaverse field, and ever since, this word has spread around like wildfire.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), on the other hand, were undoubtedly the hottest topic of 2021, and this trend appears to have continued into 2022 as well.
Now, however, it appears that retail interest in both is fading.
Alarming data from Google Trends
Google Trends data is usually a good way to gauge retailers’ interest in certain topics. In this case, we’re taking a closer look at the one-year graph of Google search volume for the keywords “metaverse” and “NFT” globally.
This is what the metaverse searches chart looks like:
This is the same graph adjusted for the NFT keyword:
It’s evident that the interest has returned to what it was back in October last year, before the winter hype that saw many collections peak in terms of their floor price.
Declining NFT trading volume
Research data alone can hardly be used to gauge interest, but the overall volume of NFT transactions most certainly supports the above.
According to NonFungible – a popular NFT resource – the weekly volume has been declining steadily for quite some time now.
It’s also worth noting, though, that retail interest in the cryptocurrency industry, in general, has been somewhat declining as of late, which has also translated to measurably lower trading volumes across the board. This, of course, has its exceptions.
As CryptoPotato Reported recently, BTC transaction volumes in Ukraine and Russia skyrocketed last week due to the ongoing war between the two countries. This gave many Bitcoin proponents an opportunity to highlight the cryptocurrency’s status as an uncorrelated asset.
