Cryptocurrency is suddenly one of the most volatile and fast-moving areas in technology these days, so much so that seemingly no one can agree whether it’s a bubble or a bona fide boom.

Investment firms are deluged with coin offering proposals at the rate of 70 per week, legacy institutions such as Kodak are jumping into the blockchain frenzy, and even as some of its harshest critics, such as JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Diamond, are now backing off their earlier statements, others such as Warren Buffett continue to have grave doubts.

But digging a little deeper, it’s clear that some experienced entrepreneurs who have been right before are starting to bet there’s something real behind the insanity.

“A lot of people sense there’s something very interesting happening and it’s not just market froth right now,” said Peter Vessenes, managing director at New Alchemy, an advisory group on the token and blockchain industry.

Major interest in digital money at CES

Vessenes spoke during the CoinAgenda Summit in Las Vegas on Monday, held concurrently with the Consumer Electronics Show. The event was one of two daylong gatherings to discuss digital money as part of the consumer technology industry’s biggest week. Five years ago, there were no sessions at all and the small number of digital currency companies attending CES could be found huddled in a tiny golf clubhouse miles from the convention center. A nearly 1,200 percent rise in bitcoin value over the last 12 months has changed that picture in a big way.

One of the entrepreneurs who has been active in the digital currency space is Halsey Minor, CEO of a startup called VideoCoin. Minor, who launched the crypto wallet Uphold in 2013, has embarked on a new journey to deploy a video encoding and content distribution network running on the blockchain with a native protocol token. The ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of distributing video by taking advantage of unused computing resources.

That a serial entrepreneur such as Minor is now deep into the cryptocurrency world should come as no great surprise. This is a man who built a career on taking risks. In addition to founding CNET, Minor was the co-founder and second-largest shareholder in Salesforce, he formed a partnership in the early 1990s with a very young Jeff Bezos to build a newsfeed aggregator (it didn’t take off), and invested in a company called GrandCentral that became Google Voice.

“The blockchain is the next architecture that will allow resources to be harnessed from all over the world,” Minor said during the CoinAgenda gathering. “We’re creating a commodity around computing and we’re doing it around video.”

The use of compute-based commodities is an emerging trend surrounding the digital currency arena. Another example of this can be seen in the recent work of Larry Sanger, chief information officer of the startup Everipedia. A co-founder of Wikipedia, Sanger has embarked on this new venture out of concern that the online encyclopedia has hit a dead end.

“Wikipedia represents an enormous missed opportunity,” said Sanger during his appearance at CoinAgenda on Monday, reiterating his criticism from a recent blog post. Everipedia’s solution is to use the blockchain as a tool for cataloging knowledge differently, widening the sources of information beyond Wikipedia’s small community and rewarding contributors with tokens.

Crowdfunding platform starts accepting ICOs

Howard Marks, the co-founder of Activision, one of the world’s oldest and largest gaming companies, is another prominent tech industry figure who is actively pursuing initiatives in cryptocurrency. His latest venture, StartEngine, recently became the first crowdfunding platform to start accepting initial coin offerings.

StartEngine sits at the center of a controversy that is boiling in the cryptocurrency world and promises to get even hotter. Although the company will only accept U.S.-based ICOs that meet Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, a number of financial technology executives chafe at the notion that digital coins must be treated as securities.

One of the people less than thrilled about the regulatory climate is Chris Kitze. Over a 25-year career in the tech industry, Kitze has been part of Lycos and NBCi. He’s now the CEO of FlashCoin, a blockchain platform for application development and marketing.

“I’m not doing any business with crypto in the U.S., it’s just too problematic,” Kitze said. “The regulatory environment we’re dealing with here is just shooting the U.S. in the foot.”

SEC issues warning

Although some observers are predicting that the SEC will ultimately step in and crack down on ICOs, the agency has so far taken very little action. Chairman Jay Clayton issued a statement stating that as of mid-December, no ICOs had registered with the SEC and warned about the risks of investing.

One of the leading voices on blockchain technology is Matthew Roszak, chairman and co-founder of the blockchain enterprise software company Bloq. A founding partner of Tally Capital, Roszak has spent more than 20 years in technology investment and has seen a lot of money flow down the startup river. During a discussion at the CoinAgenda event, he described how cryptocurrency represents an important milestone.

“If you look back at 2017 it was an explosion of innovation in finance,” Roszak said. “I finally felt for the first time in my life I could be part of the something that will change the world.”

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