Retail investors spooked by endless negative headlines — FTX’s implosion and memecoin pump-and-dumps among them — are turning their heads toward Ethereum again, lured by Ether’s outperformance over the past week.

At least, if poorly informed searches for Ethereum are to be believed.

“Google searches for ‘Etherium’ — misspelled — are spiking. Retail is so back,” Kyle Chassé, a Bitcoin influencer, said on X. Another user pointed to even further-afield spellings as more proof of the turnaround in sentiment.

Searches for Ethereum have also jumped, hitting their highest point since February, according to Google Trends data.

The spike in activity comes amid a pumping market. Ether was up more than 42% over the past week, compared to Solana with a 22% gain and Bitcoin at 11%. Last week, some $305 million in Ether shorts were liquidated.

“ETH’s performance has been even more astonishing” than Bitcoin’s, wrote Noelle Acheson in her newsletter Crypto Is Macro Now on Monday. Bitcoin topped $100,000 on May 8 for the first time since Feb. 7.

“Bitcoin crossing $100,000 signals a full-on narrative reset,” Mike Cahill, CEO of Douro Labs, a Pyth Network contributor, recently told DL News.

That reset may extend to the Ethereum blockchain and its Ether cryptocurrency, which have been plagued by bad publicity, and bad performance, in recent years.

“The people allocating capital, who are going to put a $50 million slug into ETH, they’re looking at the margins going down, like, ‘when does this stop,’ ” Kain Warwick, the founder of the decentralised finance application Infinex, recently told DL News.

In January Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, announced leadership changes at the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that plays a major role in the network’s development. Analysts say that may be one factor contributing to Ether’s recent rally.

As the home of most stablecoins and DeFi protocols, Ethereum is the “foundational layer” of the crypto economy, Nexo Dispatch analyst Iliya Kalchev told DL News.

“That kind of relevance doesn’t stay discounted for long,” he said.

Andrew Flanagan is a markets correspondent for DL News. Have a tip? Reach out to aflanagan@dlnews.com.