So, what does the American encryption community think of BSC and HECO? Have these two chains aroused great repercussions in Western society?

To find out, we looked at a range of factors, including U.S. web search volume, Google Trends data, and media exposure, to gauge how much interest the U.S. crypto community has in these Ethereum alternatives.

First, we looked at monthly search volume data provided by the search tracking tool SEMRush. According to SEMRush estimates, there are 480 monthly PC searches for “Binance Smart Chain” in the US. This number is still vastly different from major smart contract chains such as Ethereum (135,000 monthly searches), EOS (90,500 monthly searches), or Tezos (22,200 monthly searches).

But it’s already far outperforming HECO — “Huobi Eco” and “HECO token” both have zero monthly searches, according to SEMRush estimates. While there are thousands of searches for the term "HECO," most are for the Hawaiian electric company or other companies that are abbreviated as HECO. Searching for HECO on Google, the first five pages of search results include a design studio, a civil engineering company, a speaker company, and a stove manufacturer, but there is no Huobi ecological chain.

It must be pointed out that SEMRush’s search volume is estimated, so zero search volume does not mean that no one searches for this keyword in the United States; The radar cannot obtain the corresponding data.

The same goes for Google Trends data, which is owned by Google itself. Instead of actual search volume, Google Trends provides a relative scale from 0 to 100—specifically, the highest number of searches in a period is assigned a score of 100, and the lowest number of searches is assigned a score of 0. Here’s how these two chains compare to Google Trends data for Tezos in the US:

We can see that both chains have far less search volume than Tezos, let alone EOS or Ethereum. However, the search volume of Binance Smart Chain on Google has surged, while the search trend of HECO has always been low. If we remove Tezos and add data for another HECO related term, we can see that there is no change in the results. BSC is trending higher and higher in Google searches, but HECO has never scored above zero.

The same is true by more subjective measures. The BSC has generated enough interest to be featured in multiple articles in major U.S. crypto outlets such as CoinDesk. Not so with HECO.

On social networking sites like Reddit, people are also focusing on BSC, not HECO.

The reason for all this may be simple: Binance is a well-known and widely used exchange in the US, while Huobi is not. The Binance community on Reddit has more than 188,000 members; the Huobi community has fewer than 2,000. The difference in U.S. attention is almost certainly not related to the technology itself, but to the relative popularity of the exchanges.

Among Americans who are aware of the BSC, the prevailing attitude seems to be one of caution and curiosity. Because the project is in China, there is some skepticism about whether Binance Smart Chain is truly decentralized. But most of the discussion about BSC is related to more general issues, such as what applications will be launched on it, whether there is a good Moonshot project on BSC, how to perform various types of transfers through BSC, and so on.

It is undeniable that, as of now, neither the Binance Smart Chain nor the Huobi Ecological Chain has reached the level of challenging more mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum and EOS in the United States. But unlike HECO, BSC does appear to be gaining traction. Given Binance’s popularity in the U.S., things could look very different six months or a year from now.

LongHash, Use data to understand the blockchain.