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Fortune convened some top cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, bankers, and others to chat about the future of digital money at Fortunes Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo. last week. A select group met at the Aspen Institute for a breakfast roundtable discussion on Wednesday morning.

Headliners on the panel included Balaji Srinivasan, CEO and cofounder of 21.co, a cryptocurrency startup that has raised more in traditional VC funding than almost other one. Another was Peter Smith, CEO and cofounder of Blockchain, a U.K.-based cryptocurrency wallet company that recently raised $40 million from GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet, parent company of Google (goog). And Kathleen Breitman, CEO and cofounder of Tezos, a blockchain startup that this year raised more than $200 million in an initial coin offering, or ICO, and which counts celeb investor Tim Draper among its backers.

The crew of experts weighed in on everything from the longevity of Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency and blockchain, or cryptographically secured public ledger, to the latest trend of hosting so-called token sales to fund projects, especially on Ethereum, a rival blockchain to Bitcoins, to the future of a decentralized web. Here are some of the predictions we heard.

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Most people who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency appear to agree that Bitcoin and its newer rival Ethereum have staying power, though they may be more bullish on one versus the other. "In terms of 5 to 10 years, Bitcoin and Ether will be around I bet," Balaji Srinivasan told the room of more than 70 people.

Peter Smith said his company, Blockchain, which was early to Bitcoin, has only just started to warm up to newcomer Ethereum. In contrast, Mike Cagney, CEO and cofounder of SoFi, a personal finance company, said during a separate session on the main stage that he was hotter on the latter technology.

Bitcoin "has some purpose but its application for commercial transaction is limited right now," Cagney said. "The blockchain and Ethereum, on the other hand, have absolutely fascinating infrastructure applications, he continued, mentioning the possibility to overhaul title insurance, which involves policies related to real estate, as one example.

Bitcoin and Ethereum may have stolen the show at this point, but the innovation wont end there. Expect more winners on the horizon.

Kathleen Breitman is hopeful that Tezos, her own blockchain bet, will fill a niche that solves problems with extant blockchains. In particular, she and her projects developers are designing Tezos to automatically push software updates out to the network, thus, in theory, avoiding the divisive feuding over upgrades that has wracked systems like Bitcoin over the past few years.

No one can say how many tokens and coins and blockchain protocols will eventually win out, but the experts seem to think theres room for a multitude. "Its likely that another one or two dominant ones we havent seen yet in the market," Smith projected. "Another really dominant coin could come out this year or next year.

For the time being, token sales might seem like a fantastic way to raise a lot of money quickly and with few questions asked. Will this lead to riches for some? Undoubtedlyindeed, it already has. And rip-offs for others? Almost certainly.

Smith said he presumes that market manipulation and insider dealing is rampant among purveyors of initial coin offerings. Were cautious about it in the short term, Smith said of his company. But you have to temper that with the idea that every new technology is going to be like that in the beginning.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple and a former executive at Yahoo, voiced his less forgiving concerns about the sector on a separate panel. Heavily regulated markets are typically heavily regulated for a reason, he said. Frauds are happening, people are going to jail.

The days of making a pilgrimage to the homes of the holders of purse strings are coming to an end. In a world where anyone can participate as an investor online, physical location matters much less.

It used to be you had to come to Silicon Valley, walk up Sand Hill Road, network with individuals, Srinivasan said about entrepreneurs seeking funding, often strolling up a strip to the west of Palo Alto that long has been associated with venture capital firms. ICOs change all that.

Projects are already getting funded this Kickstarter-like new way. Breitman said she that when she set up Tezos token sale, she aimed to get as many people who wanted to participate in the ecosystem to contribute. The company raised more than $200 million to date and, according to her, more than 30,000 Tezos wallets have been opened.

Elena Kvochko, chief information officer of the security division at Barclays, said that her bank has had talks with regulators about Bitcoin, blockchains, and their ilk. The rule-sticklers appear to be open to the idea as long as know your customer laws are obeyed, although its still early days.

Meanwhile, as governments settle on sets of rules of the road, countries like Switzerland, Singapore, and Estonia are jostling to develop frameworks that easily accommodate the new technology, Srinivasan said. Theyre seeking to displace geographic incumbents and become hubs for a new wave of business financing. If youre a U.S. person or business, you have a good deal to be concerned about, Smith said.

Breitman added that until the rules are agreed upon, its best to be transparent about what one is doing.

As cryptocurrency prices fluctuate wildly, speculators have been having a field day. However, theres reason to believe the markets will become more stable, as Bitcoin gradually has over the past couple of years (despite its still big price swings), Smith said.

In order for these computer coins to catch on big-time, they need a use-case that beats traditional money. Ideally, this ought to be better than merely buying drugs, as Jeff John Roberts, Fortune reporter and the sessions moderator, noted.

Srinivasan proposed one possible scenario. Imagine that all your waking hours are spent in the Matrix, he said, referring to a virtual reality in which everyone is enmeshed in the future. As people from all over the world meet and interact, they will need a medium of exchange. To transact, you cant just hand over a dollar bill, Srinivasan said. You need an international currency for that.

It might take a while but theres going to be more of a need to transact across borders than there is today, he said.

Whenever a consumer swipes or dips a credit card, payment processors charge a fee.

Nicko van Someren, chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation, pointed out that the fee companies like Visa or Mastercard charge exceeds the cost to clear or settle transactions. These businesses can potentially process transactions quicker and cheaper, he contended.

One potential outcome of the adoption of alternate systems, like Bitcoin, is to provide companies with the impetus to improve their services. Bitcoin is good because it will make banks move toward the real cost of handling these transactions, van Someren said. (By extension, in Ethereum's case, one could imagine upstart companies built on it forcing giants like Amazon, Facebook, or Dropbox to reconsider or improve their respective offerings.)

Smith, meanwhile, was less optimistic about incumbents ability to adapt to such change. I dont think be lot of room for banks to simply adjust their price models, he said.

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7 Cryptocurrency Predictions From the Experts - fortune.com

An official for Russia's nationallegislature believes that new laws regulating the exchange of cryptocurrencies will be complete by the end of the fall.

Anatoly Aksakov, who leads the State Duma's financial markets committee, told Russian media this week that next steps involve the formation of a dedicated working group to address the issue.Further, he said that he would be meeting with officials from Russia's central bank and the Ministry of Finance in the coming days.

Should all the pieces come together Russian officials have been working on some kind of law related to the tech since as early as 2014 lawmakers could complete work on a legislative passage over the next several months, according to Aksakov.

He said (in translated comments):

"If we agree on the main approaches in the coming week, I think that by autumn, by the end of the fall session, we will be able to adopt this law in order to provide a legal space for the development of this market."

The comments come amid a flurry of news out of Russia on the cryptocurrency front. The country's deputy finance minister, for example, said earlier this week that he thinks bitcoin trading should be restricted to qualified investors. The chief internet advisor to president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, unveiled the formation of a new blockchain and cryptocurrency advocacy group earlier this week.

Image Credit:ID1974 / Shutterstock.com

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Russia Could Pass Cryptocurrency Law This Year, Senior Lawmaker Says - CoinDesk

Earlier this year, we reported that, for the first time, a major venture capital firm, Union Square Ventures, invested in a blockchain hedge fund. But thats not all thats been invested in blockchain technology. By next year, 90% of central banks and 80% of financial banks will have engaged in some form of investment, programming, or planning to incorporate blockchain into their main business functions and workflows. But with cybersecurity a main determinant in which blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies receive investment, blockchain fintech companies need to be vigilant when protecting their assets from any intruder.

In this regard, one such company rises above the rest. Its name is AxionV, and it is currently about to undergo its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on September 16. AxionV is an AI crypto fund which uses proprietary algorithms and complex trading strategies to achieve much better returns for your money. Their information caught my eye because it stood out in several ways, including its unparalleled security, which is something I look for when analyzing ICOs and crypto trading. In a nutshell, the AxionV ICO seems like a unique and interesting project, because it gives access to top talent in the trading space to anyone, not just established traders.

Founded by professional traders and blockchain technology experts, it takes pride in implementing leading security protocols to ensure that company operations will continue in virtually any situation without major interruptions.

When looking for security frameworks, AxionV made the strategic decision to benchmark to institutions outside of finance that already have the highest need to be as safe and secure as possible. This is why the Nuclear Energy Institute was selected as the model framework for the firm. Beyond this, to offer clarity on jurisdiction and regulatory issues, AxionV is developing five legal teams established throughout the Asia-Pacific, Europe and Americas regions to address regional issues in order to protect the firm and its potential investors while engaging directly with local governments and advisory committees. This is the framework consisting of five risk categories. While the majority of ICOs using blockchain could claim relative software security, the other 4 layers are most often omitted.

Blockchain currently is one of, if not the most secure protocols that is luckily, also open-source.

AxionVs technology actually minimizes the use of smart contracts, leading to more security for clients and less risk to the company. This is notable and perhaps counterintuitive because one of blockchains most lauded features is the ability to create smart contractsthat is, contracts recorded on the blockchain which execute themselves.

AxionV has a reason for this: the widely reported attack on the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Last year, a lone hacker attacked the DAO, the largest crowdfunded Ethereum blockchain organization in history at over $150m. This hacker discovered a vulnerability in the DAOs smart contract integrity, and isolated and attacked a highly valuable smart contract, siphoning over 3.6 million Ether from the organization into a child DAO with a mirroring structure. Due to this, the price of Ethereum dropped 35% last year. Yet, since AxionV mostly excludes smart contracts from the code handling of any tokens, the result is a more stable and fork-resistant token.

Hardware security offers another important layer of protection. We often trust the largest manufacturers such as Apple, Intel, HP, etc. to not insert any special chips inside the machines as backdoors, but given their proprietary nature, its always a possibility.

Whether it sounds unrealistic or not, history teaches us many breaches of hardware security will occur. One of them is mentioned by Kevin Mitnick a renowned security consultant and hacker. A program one hacker favored was called Spy Lantern, a hardware based program with the ability to monitor and record computer activities as a target works, allowing the hacker to secretly intercept every keystroke typed on the target's computer system except that this one is supposedly completely invisible on the target's machine.

The AxionV teams advantage compared to the competition is that they monitor hardware by verifying every machine to identify potential security breaches before deployment. AxionVs protocol involves fully assembling proprietary machines on site or directing private orders from the top manufacturers only.

Every company attempts to fully protect its information from the outside world. Perfect information protection is impossible, because employees are humans who constantly interact with the outside world. Many companies, to save expenses, install WiFi and connect machines / computers / servers with private information to WiFi. This creates a huge threat. Intruders, once they learn the password to the WiFi, can access the entire system by starting as an average user account, and increasing its access rights using a variety of techniques.

In reality, there are very few companies with sufficient educational programs that cover environmental security. Most often, theres just too much ground to cover.

AxionVs solution to environment security is to divide infrastructure into two main parts: internal and external. The internal infrastructure has no connection to the outside world, and it is fully isolated within its own environment, much like in a nuclear plant. It will be completely disconnected from the internet or people who dont have the access rights. External, on the other hand, will be public and open, accessible to virtually anyone. The idea itself is inspired by Blockchain in that it also uses a combination of a public and a private keys to produce maximum security.

Every person is a source of information. Every employee has access to some piece of valuable information that can be used against the company without realizing it. These pieces of information can help intruders get access to private information. Even corporate slang or references used outside of the workplace can be used by hackers adept at social engineering to access protected information.

Many organizations decide not to even pay attention or even consider this aspect, thinking its very unlikely it will happen. However, this is a very important factor to consider. NDAs do not work either they serve more as a psychological protection, but not as a real protection against intruders and accidental disclosure.

Examples of security breaches with failed security protocols include Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who committed espionage and gave out nuclear program of the U.S. to the Soviet Union. Or Edward Snowden, who worked at the CIA and deliberately leaked lots of information.

AxionV uses structured access to information for every employee, including provisions for loss of any employees. Every employee goes through extensive training about which information they have access to and what ways this information can be stolen from them.

Given the current landscapes throughout the world regarding blockchain, ICOs, Startups and investing, anticipating and strategic legal strategies are needed to maintain a business like AxionV. Multiple regulatory bodies have already made their stances known, but real laws and binding decisions have been mercurial so far. AxionV has developed a roadmap to combat the nature of attorneys own conflicts of interests and how to deal with the worldwide regulatory uncertainty. The strategy is to seek multiple opinions from its five legal teams and always go with the most conservative decision. AxionV willingly works within local regulations as a thought leader with the goal of helping the blockchain world develop and utilize a robust Know your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering framework that will punish violators and reward honest clients. Currently, it is considering an advanced adaptation of the proposed SAFT or Simple Agreement for Token framework, which has been modeled from SAFE from Y Combinator, as a simple framework established between VCs and startups.

Overall, I see how AxionV is leading the way in cyber security in this space, providing the framework for future ICO launches that need to be more secure, while providing immediate value to those who invest in the ICO as the AI trades and increases the value of the fund. For more information, Ive found their website and blog to both be great resources for information about their upcoming ICO as well as the future of the fund.

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AxionV: AI Cryptocurrency Fund Leading the Way in ICO Security - HuffPost