Filipinos’ growing interest in cryptocurrency or digital currency is highly influenced by Western pop culture, according to recent data.
Data reviewed by iPrice Group, Southeast Asia’s leading e-commerce aggregator, found four recent trends online that made a huge impact among Filipinos with their online consumer behavior, which includes cryptocurrency.
In one of the trends, the researchers mentioned big names in the Western pop culture who declared their investment with cryptocurrency.
These celebrities include Kanye West, Paris Hilton and business magnate Elon Musk.
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“Kanye West talked about cryptocurrency in Joe Rogan’s podcast in October 2020. In December 2020, Elon Musk tweeted about Dogecoin. Thus, the searches for cryptocurrency started to increase by 53% since Kanye’s podcast episode,” the study said.
“In February 2021, Jack Dorsey, Jay Z, and Snoop Dogg started to put on a good word. Tesla announced its $1.5 billion purchase of bitcoin in the same month. At the end of March 2021, Snoop Dogg announced the release of his first NFT collection. Shortly after in April 2021, Paris Hilton talked about bitcoin and NFT as well,” it added.
Following these announcements, searches about cryptocurrency increased by 542% in the past two years as compared to the same month Kanye first mentioned it in a podcast.
“One may argue that cryptocurrency is just a hot market at the moment. After all, surges in search volume were also experienced in other Southeast Asian countries,” the marketing firm said.
“But all these statements from western influencers may have helped in spreading this information as well, especially to the general public,” it added.
The cryptocurrency exchange platform in the Philippines is the Philippine Digital Asset Exchange, which is also regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
Through this platform, traders and investors can buy fractional coins or partial pieces of any cryptocurrency such as bitcoin.
Filipino cryptocurrency investors previously experienced a major outage, which resulted to their accounts being inaccessible for a time.
Aside from cryptocurrency, the iPrice data also mentioned Grammy award-winner Billie Eilish’s green hair, footwear brand Crocs collaborations with Hollywood celebrities and Kanye’s activities as the main trends that greatly influenced Filipino consumers’ Google searches since 2020.
The data were collected from May 2019 to April 2021. Search volumes for the keywords “Crocs,” “Yeezy,” “cryptocurrency,” and “green hair dye” were gathered from the Google Keyword Planner.
