Crypto Market Caps Not Correlated With Public Interest, Wikipedia Traffic Suggests

Page view data from Wikipedia, one of the most well-known websites on the internet, suggest that cryptocurrency market caps aren’t exactly correlated with the public’s interest. This, to some, could mean certain cryptos are currently overvalued, while others are undervalued.

According to data published by cryptocurrency analytics platform DataLight, the cryptocurrency that has been seeing the highest number of page views on Wikipedia is Bitcoin, as between December 24 and January 24 its page was seen over 292,000 times a day.

Next came Ethereum, with over 46,000 daily views, followed by Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) with 27,000, XRP with 21,500, BCH with 19700, and XMR with 17,200. Dogecoin and litecoin, a meme cryptocurrency and one created to be the silver to bitcoin’s gold, came next with 15,900 and 11,400.

How do you think, what does a high amount of Wikipedia views signal for a coin? pic.twitter.com/UnmoOy99Tx

— DataLight (@DataLightMe) January 24, 2019

Looking at the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap we see public interest isn’t following the largest coins. While BTC is dominant on both metrics, XRP comes next by market cap and not by page views, followed by Ethereum.

Brave’s BAT, which is set to power the company’s privacy-respecting advertising model based on users’ attention, notably sees a large number of daily views on Wikipedia, although its market cap is $154 million, making it the 36th largest cryptocurrency.

Similarly, XMR’s market cap is of $760 million, making it the 14th largest cryptocurrency. In terms of public interest, it appears to – just like BAT – be well above coins with a bigger market cap, including Binance’s BNB, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV), ADA, TRON’s TRX, and EOS.

While this could suggest some cryptocurrencies are overbought or oversold, DataLight points out it appears Wikipedia readers are more interested “in rather old and well-known coins,” which could also suggest the website is merely being used for research.

Notably, Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales claimed last year he believed the cryptocurrency space is “absolutely, definitely in a bubble.” Wales has notably also claimed that in order to raise funds Wikipedia is “absolutely never” conducting an initial coin offering (ICO).

Larry Sanger, another Wikipedia co-founder has shared plans and insights on blockchain-based encyclopedias.