KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 16): Google’s keyword search data shows interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has surged to record levels, with traffic beating out search terms pertinent to many crypto assets ranked among the top ten.

Citing Google Trends, cryptocurrency news portal Cointelegraph on Tuesday (Nov 16) said interest in NFTs saw a dramatic spike at the start of the year as Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot and vintage Ethereum-based NFTs saw frenzied speculation.

It said while the bubble initially appeared short-lived — with search volume drying up by roughly 75% as of the end of June, interest began to bounce back in July before breaking into new highs at the end of October.

It said since then, Google search traffic for NFT-related keywords has continued to surge, doubling over the past three months.

Cointelegraph said the spike in interest has seen “NFT” overtake many of keywords that have long-dominated crypto-related search traffic, including “DeFi”, “Ethereum”, and even “blockchain”.

It said while Dogecoin firmly captured the public’s imagination during the second quarter — with search volume for “Dogecoin” rising to rival “Bitcoin” in early May , dog-token fever quickly subsided in the third quarter. As such, the Google Trends data suggests the momentum behind the canine-coin rally was immediately channelled into hype for NFTs.

According to Google Trends, NFT search traffic is currently dominated by Asian nations, with China, Uganda, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines topping the keyword’s search rankings.

China’s search volume for “NFT” peaked between Sept 5 to 11 this year.

The month before the spike, China’s Tencent launched its NFT trading platform Huanhe and Alibaba launched a marketplace allowing users to trade licences to create NFTs from copyrighted content.