Hardly any growth in downloaded crypto apps, despite tripling price bitcoin

The price of bitcoin has tripled this year, you would expect that bitcoin has become much more popular. Maybe that is also true, but that is not reflected in the number of downloads of crypto related apps on phones.

The number of downloads hardly differs

Figures from App Annie show that slightly more bitcoin apps were downloaded in the first half of 2019 than in the first half of 2018. you would expect a bigger difference.

In the first half of 2019, approximately 67 million crypto apps were downloaded by users, compared to 65.8 million in the first six months of last year.

Mobile became popular

In a large part of the world, mobile phones are the only way to access the internet, and therefore to get cryptocurrency. But not only in developing countries is the mobile used to trade, but also in the Netherlands and, for example, the US, many people use mobile apps to trade in cryptos. In addition, almost every website also scales well on mobile. Take a look here.

App Annie researched figures from the Apple App Store and Google Play. The search engine found more than 6,500 app providers with words such as cryptocurrency, blockchain or bitcoin as of 26 June.

The total number of crypto apps has risen by 35 percent since January 2018, among other things because large and popular apps such as the Gemini Exchange and the Dutch company Blox went live. Blox is a free trading app, for iOS and Android.

Consumers don’t seem to have found the way yet

The number of downloaded apps does not say much about the market in itself, but it fits in the same pattern as the searches on Google. If you want to know if FOMO has led to more enthusiasm from the general public, then app downloads and searches are a good indicator.

If you look at the number of searches on Google for the word bitcoin, you will see that in December 2017 there were five times more searches on bitcoin. You could draw the cautious conclusion that the consumer has not yet sought and found bitcoin this year. Maybe fomo only strikes the rest of the world once a new all-time high (higher than $ 20,000) has been reached.

Although, Yahoo reports the number of searches for it bitcoin is higher than the number of searches for Kim Kardashian.

Institutional demand higher than private demand

Without kidding about the Kardashians, last month’s price rise to $ 10,000 seems to have been driven by institutional demand, rather than by private individuals. This is also confirmed by the CME Group. On 17 June, 5,311 contracts were open from institutional parties, these contracts had a combined value of 26,555 bitcoin, approximately $ 250 million. A second confirmation was posted on Twitter on June 18:

CME Bitcoin futures (BTC) shows growing signs of institutional interest. BTC open interest rose by a record 643 contracts in a single day, establishing a new all-time high or 5,311 contracts on June 17 (26.5555 bitcoin equivalent; ~ $ 250M notional). https://t.co/I6A3jD6Iq3 pic.twitter.com/ljz6EbvK79

– CMEGroup (@CMEGroup) June 18, 2019