What’s the takeaway from a week in which cryptocurrency prices crashed to alarming lows and a blockchain conference attracted a slew of tech industry stars (and Larry King)? Perhaps it’s that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and fidgety market analysts are too myopic to see blockchain and crypto’s unfolding grand plan.

There were some occasional frowns visible on the faces of attendees at the Blockchain Futurist Conference last week, according to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. 

“Yet everyone’s upbeat, because they’re talking about the future, not about prices,” he said.

Investors and entrepreneurs pouring sweat, toil and dollars into blockchain’s encryption ledger technology and its spawned cryptocurrencies have a lucrative end goal in mind. But a bad week on the market is not going to derail the building of durable companies and entrepreneurial activity going on away from the stock floor, Furrier pointed out. 

Furrier spoke with Al Burgio, founder of the DigitalBits Project, Fusechain Inc. and Console Connect Inc., and Julie Lyle, interim chief marketing officer of Barnes & Noble Inc., former CMO of Walmart, and DigitalBits advisor, during the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto, Ontario. They discussed the market upset and the long-term prospects of blockchain and tokenization in the building of Web 3.0. 

Ease of use will ‘ease in’ use cases

Alongside the hype around blockchain, there is some impatience in terms of when the awaited disruption will actually materialize on the ground.

“I think in the market in general, there’s this concern, like when’s the use going to happen?” Burgio said. Early-stage blockchain projects are going to market extremely quickly and most of them fail, he added.

But the fact is that most startups — blockchain or otherwise — fail. Out of all of those failures, eventually a phoenix rises in the form of an Amazon Web Services Inc. or what-have-you, and no one remembers all the false starts that came before. 

Speaking of AWS, it was once as wonky and difficult as blockchain, and then smart engineering changed that. “Let’s make it consumable and easy — boom, usage goes up. Same kind of thing going on here,” Furrier said.

There’s still a lot of work to be done in corporate America, according to Lyle. “Private or public businesses — there’s a lot of infrastructure to build that interoperability and to make it a seamless experience that will either drive value and adoption or it won’t,” she said. “And we’ve seen that with other technologies fail as well.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Blockchain Futurist Conference.

Photo: Untraceable Inc.