The price of memecoin has risen to the sky, but retail investors have not yet returned to the market.

Although the crypto market is making significant progress and memecoins are seeing impressive gains, interest from retail investors seems to be absent in this bullish phase. According to data from Google, the search volume for the keyword "memecoin" currently only reaches 14 on the relative scale — much lower than the peak of 100 in January and just above last month's level of 19.

This occurs even when the GMCI Memecoin index shows that the prices of top memecoins have increased by about 50% in the past month, indicating that the recent bullish momentum is still not enough to attract attention or widespread participation from the public.

The absence of retail investors is also clearly reflected in other popular keywords such as "bitcoin," "ethereum," "coinbase," and "solana" as the search volume has hardly fluctuated, despite the bullish trend of the crypto market. The rankings on app stores also reflect this trend: Coinbase and Robinhood — two platforms that were once familiar indicators of retail investor participation — currently stand around the 300th position on the US App Store, instead of climbing to the top like in previous growth cycles. In the past, whenever the market entered a boom phase, these two apps often ranked among the most downloaded as waves of new users flocked in.

The current developments suggest that this bullish phase may primarily be driven by investors familiar with the market and large institutions, rather than retail waves which were the main driving force in previous cycles. This raises an interesting question: will retail investors return to align with price movements soon, or will this cycle continue to be the playground of professional and institutional investors?

Thạch Sanh