Google searches for “Bitcoin going to zero” have surged to their highest level since the post‑FTX panic in November 2022, according to Google Trends data for the past five years.
The spike aligns with Bitcoin’s latest drawdown from its Oct. 6, 2025, all‑time high near $126,000 to about $66,500 at the time of writing on Thursday, according to data from Coingecko, leaving the asset almost 50% below its peak.
At the same time, the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index has plunged into extreme fear around 9, levels previously seen during the Terra ecosystem collapse and the FTX fallout in 2022.
Google Trends shows that worldwide interest in the phrase “Bitcoin going to zero” last hit comparable levels in early November 2022, when FTX froze withdrawals, and Bitcoin (BTC) crashed to around $15,000.
Today’s Bitcoin fears different from 2022
Crypto intelligence platform Perception analyzed narrative intelligence across 650+ crypto media sources and shared its findings with Cointelegraph.
Founder Fernando Nikolic said that fear in 2022 was driven by internal events, such as cascading failures of centralized lenders and one of the industry’s largest exchanges, while today’s fear is “driven by macro fears and being amplified by a single bearish voice.”
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Nikolic said that Bloomberg’s Mike McGlone has been the loudest single voice driving the “Bitcoin could go to zero (or near-zero)” narrative, and that he has been a “one-man content machine this cycle,” calling Bitcoin to $10,000 on Feb. 3, saying markets were headed for a 2008-style crash and continuously calling for Bitcoin’s decline throughout the past month.
He told Cointelegraph that McGlone is repeatedly amplified by crypto media sites and has “essentially been the go-to bearish quote for the past three weeks.” “This media saturation likely contributes directly to the Google search spike,” he said.
Retail fear lags professional media sentiment
Nikolic said that the actual counterpoint that “nobody is synthesizing” is that, while “Bitcoin to zero” searches are spiking, institutional buyers are accumulating more BTC, pointing to the fact that sovereign wealth funds, such as Abu Dhabi, are increasing their Bitcoin exchange-traded fund holdings, and large corporations like Strategy continue to stack BTC.
According to Perception data, he said, media sentiment bottomed on Feb. 5, but has been recovering for two weeks, while Google “Bitcoin going to zero” searches are peaking now in mid-February.
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Retail fear lags professional media sentiment by about 10-14 days, he said. “By the time the public is most scared, the professional narrative has already started to stabilize. The retail narrative and institutional behavior are moving in opposite directions.”
Macro fears and quantum angst
The surge in “Bitcoin going to zero” searches is also unfolding against a backdrop of record‑high macro anxiety.
The World Uncertainty Index, which counts references to “uncertainty” in Economist Intelligence Unit country reports, is sitting at its highest level in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) time series, exceeding the peaks seen around the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID‑19 shock.
Research underpinning the index finds that spikes in global uncertainty tend to precede weaker output and slower growth as companies delay investment and hiring.
Quantum fears have also been a persistent background narrative since October 2025, according to Nikolic, but he said that quantum fear spikes alongside price drops, not independently.
“Bitcoin quantum” searches peaked in November 2025 and have been falling steadily since, according to Google Trends.
“It’s an amplifier of existing bearish sentiment, not a standalone driver. The “Bitcoin going to zero” search trend is likely a composite of price-crash fear + quantum existential fear + McGlone-style macro doom, all converging in the same window.”
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