Interest in Bitcoin Services Grows as Altcoin Platforms Lose Traction

An interesting screenshot has surfaced on Twitter today, which shows how the internet statistics for most bitcoin-related websites have gone up by quite a margin over the past month. Nearly every site in the top 25 saw significant growth, with the exception of altcoin exchanges. Not good news for Poloniex and Bittrex, albeit they will recover from this setback.

Global Interest In Bitcoin Continues To Grow

Considering how well bitcoin has performed in the latter stages of 2016, it is not entirely surprising to see people pay more attention to cryptocurrency all of a sudden. Interestingly enough, a lot of sites which make up the top 25 of bitcoin-related platform has seen their Alexa rank improve throughout January. Albeit Alexa ranks are not the best factor to gauge interest popularity, it is a verifiable metric most people can agree on.

As one would expect, Blockchain.info and Coinbase remain the top two performing websites in this regard. Both platforms saw a 12.8% and 21.7% growth respectively, which seems to indicate a lot more people are looking to buy bitcoin and store it in a convenient wallet right now. It is unclear where most of this new traffic comes from, though, as those statistics are not provided at this time.

The smaller growth was noted for Bitcoin.org, which remains the primary website for information related to bitcoin. Although there is still growth, things only improved by 2.28% in January 2017. Compared to nearly every other site listed in this spreadsheet, that is by far less growth than one would come to expect. Then again, there are other sources for bitcoin information out there as well.

Looking at the sites gaining the most traffic in January, bitFlyer is the clear market leader. It is evident bitcoin has gained a lot of popularity in Japan over the past few weeks, ever since the PBOC introduced a string of new regulatory requirements for Chinese exchanges. With a 66% gain where the bitFlyer Alexa rank is concerned, it is clear for everyone to see Japan is well underway to become one of the largest regions for cryptocurrency moving forward.

As one would come to expect from such a list, there are some platforms losing a bit of popularity as well. Interestingly enough, there are only two real “losers”, as both Poloniex and Bittrex saw their ranking decline by quite a margin. Traders and speculators are far too busy keeping an eye on the bitcoin price to worry about alternative currencies. This is also another sign altcoins are clearly not ‘back” by any means.

All things considered, it is very positive to see bitcoin’s popularity go up at this crucial stage. With the changes made by the PBOC, things could have gone south yet for some reason, even more people are getting interested in bitcoin right now. The only services suffering from this traffic change are the ones focusing on altcoins, which is not entirely surprising considering hardly any of them provide any intrinsic value whatsoever.

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