The cryptocurrency trading volumes on PayPal have skyrocketed to a new all-time high yesterday, shattering the previous record. Having also in mind the growing Google searches for bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets, the question remains if retail investors have finally arrived.
Ever since the world’s largest online payment processor announced last year that it will enable cryptocurrency trading on its platform, the community wondered how long it will take for retail investors to start taking advantage and potentially impact the markets. After all, PayPal has a user base north of 300 million.
Data provided by the monitoring resource Nomics informed that the company has recently enjoyed a gradual increase in the crypto trading volume. Yesterday’s largely volatile trading day, though, has led to a new all-time high of over $240 million – almost twice as much as the previous record day that came on January 6th, 2021.
According to the Financial Times, the Paxos-owned digital asset platform itBit handles the transactions for PayPal.
It’s worth noting that the payment processor doesn’t allow users to withdraw the crypto assets to external wallets or use them in merchant transactions yet. Given that PayPal is largely a retail-oriented platform it’s perhaps safe to assume that the recent spike in trading volume wasn’t caused by institutions.
Google Trends data is another general indicator of the behavior of retail investors, especially when it comes down to cryptocurrency investing.
The worldwide Google searches for “bitcoin” and “buy bitcoin” recently marked freshly yearly highs, and they have kept increasing as the asset price exploded in the past several weeks. Although they are yet to reach the 2017/2018 highs, the graph below illustrates the massive growth as of late.
What’s even more compelling are the Ethereum searches. While ETH’s price has failed yet to register a new all-time high, the Google searches for the second-largest cryptocurrency have gone parabolic to a new record.
As CryptoPotato reported before, retail investors tend to enter the cryptocurrency field (or any other investment industry) once there is a significant price action to the upside. As such, the latest developments that led to massive price increases and the crypto market cap exceeding $1 trillion for the first time could be the indicator that such investors have finally joined the party.
This article was first published on: Jan 12, 2021
