There’s nothing sexier than the lure of easy money, and the initial run of Bitcoin cryptocurrency and its supporting blockchain technology for encrypting public transaction ledgers has made millionaires out of several early adopters. But the volatile market swing also made many more unlucky adopters broke, which cast a bit of a pall over both cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

As a result, the excitement over blockchain has been compared to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, when excessive speculation over any company with a “.com” after its name surged and then failed, taking many people from paper millionaires to real-life paupers.

Although much money was lost, the idea of the internet itself only continued to grow, and the investments made in infrastructure, software, servers and databases since that time have continued to grow steadily. The excitement faded, and the real work of the internet has proven itself in the almost 20 years since the dot-com bubble.

“Generally, the sentiment [around blockchain] is, ‘Hey, these boom and bust cycles, they come and they go,” said Dave Vellante, cohost of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “We’ve seen them before. Now’s the time to hunker down and innovate, execute and figure out how to add substantive value.”

Vellante and co-host John Furrier met up during the first Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto, Ontario, and discussed where they see blockchain going in the future, as well as a potential perfect storm of innovation.

Show me the money

Similar to the continuing growth of the internet after the dot com bubble, Vellante and Furrier see blockchain and token economics as having the same trajectory, where there will more organizations adopting the technology and putting it into use than ever before.

“If that trendline continues to grow, the corrections will take place, cycles will happen, but the entrepreneurs will follow the money,” Furrier said. “They’re going to follow the user experience; they’re going to follow the demand for opportunity. That to me is going to be the major tell sign.”

And what about the decentralization of blockchain? It’s a global phenomenon allowing developers all over the world to work and explore. Also, the combination of open-source software, cloud computing and new technology with new capital formation dynamics are coming together and forming a perfect storm of innovation.

Despite the volatile reputation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, by all appearances both technologies will continue to grow and influence the technologies of the future, according to Furrier and Vellante.

Here’s their complete analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Blockchain Futurist Conference:

 Photo: Untraceable Inc.