Yes, Bitcoin’s price, after reaching a two-month high of $8,300 several weeks ago, has been hovering a bit above $6,000 at the time of this printing. Yes, some of the declines follows news such as the SEC’s rejection of a second bid by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to launch the Gemini Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).

However, industry watchers agree that digital currency as an industry is here to stay. (And when has an entrepreneur turned up their nose at any market worth more than $250B?)

So what are some of the opportunities cryptocurrency is providing for entrepreneurs?

Plenty, according to sources like Rod Turner, CEO of San Diego-based alternative investment firm Manhattan Street Capital. Turner notes the “freeze effect” in Q1-2, as the SEC determined the regulatory status of U.S.-regulated Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) is now thawing, allowing fundraising activity to pick up momentum. The same factor is also causing renewed interest in the overall cryptocurrency market, he says, spurring new wallet accounts and producing a steadily increasing demand for applications that use Ether for transactions on the Ethereum platform.

A Solidifying Market

“At this point, savvy entrepreneurs and enterprises are investigating the blockchain, as another means of staying ahead of their competition,” Turner says.

NASDAQ’s reported meetings with Gemini and other trading firms is also an encouraging sign as NASDAQ has offered its support in “legitimizing” the crypto marketplace.

Early stage venture capitalist Richard Swart, a founding member of a private Silicon Valley-based investment group whose membership has $3 trillion under management, agrees.

“With the movement, we’re seeing from the regulatory bodies and three international stock exchanges, it’s clear that cryptocurrency, as an asset class, is here to stay,” he remarks.

Ultimately, Swart believes more money will come from the Blockchain itself than from the cryptocurrency it creates; however the services he sees now emerging around crypto are driving value for businesses in the digital currency space and are further coalescing the sector for sustainable growth.

For example, NASGO, a decentralized application (dAPP) platform for bitcoin exchange on the blockchain, has noted the challenge for small businesses of getting an initial foothold on cryptocurrency and tokenization.

The co-founder of NASGO, Eric Tippetts, has ample background in fundraising for digital assets and the use of token-based cryptocurrencies, having raised something on the order of $3 billion with his co-founder Steve Jiang. But for the majority of entrepreneurs, these technologies are still a mystery that many continue to seem out of reach.

So NASGO took a bold step in making cryptocurrency easier to understand and use by launching a blockchain platform called “BlockBox.” The company hopes to become the “GoDaddy” of the Blockchain by facilitating the setup or conversion of traditional web domains into tokenized blockchain entities. The product helps individuals or businesses get set up within a couple of minutes and a couple hundred dollars for the creation and exchange of a customized utility token of their own.

The BlockBox toolkit includes three elements:

1. Blockchain Domain Address search and purchase, similar to GoDaddy’s service for the purchase of classic website domains,
2. The ability to retrofit current websites for blockchain or to build new sites on the blockchain, and
3. The ability to create custom tokens for companies to use as a way to maximize loyalty and to incentivize customers. (Such as coupon points for discounts or early access to new product offerings, etc.)

The magnitude of possibilities is staggering, Tippetts notes, when you consider that individuals and businesses purchased more than 332.4 million traditional web domains in 2017 alone. He envisions a day that businesses will be able to move Blockchain and cryptocurrency value as easily as they move data through their current websites today.

Additional services such as “point of sale” and mobile purchase apps are increasing as well, to shore up the gaps that can propel the sector’s pervasive use for long-term success.

In some respects, entrepreneurs’ current challenge is a big one, in that a new poll from Gallup and Wells Fargo shows that 3 out of 4 investors with $10,000 or more invested in stocks, bonds or mutual funds, either in or outside of a retirement fund, still consider cryptocurrency a risky investment and say they have “no interest” in investing. A paltry 3 in 10 (29%) are familiar with digital currencies so far, with most of the rest (67%) acknowledging they’re aware, but have little knowledge of the cryptocurrency space. In fact, five percent say they’re not aware of the concept at all.

This new data suggests that market education, in addition to regulation and breadth of services, are the biggest current hurdles to cryptocurrency’s future levels of growth. However, this, too, is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to gain new traction by providing education to consumers and businesses on the ways they can safely and efficiently capture the new possibilities digital currency brings to the marketplace for minimum cost and risk of their own.

With premiere education events like the Blockchain Shift Conference in Miami and the Crypto Invest Summit in Los Angeles happening in October, it seems like both coasts of America offer a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors to learn more about the future of cryptocurrency and how they can position themselves to benefit from these new blockchain technologies.