Jalak Jobanputra is the founder and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures, a start-up venture capital fund that invests in decentralization and digital assets.

The following article is an exclusive contribution to the 2017 edition of CoinDesk.

2017 was the year in which cryptocurrency became widespread.

But what is even more exciting for many of us investing in the sector for several years is the development of the underlying technology.

Blockchain technology, which powers most crypto-currencies, is in the development phase. Last year, we began to see some evidence of how this new infrastructure can be used, including the announcement by the Australian Securities Exchange that it would replace its current process of post-transaction settlement by a blockchain system, after executing them simultaneously.

It reminds me of the process that big companies went through in the late 1990s and early 2000s as they moved from client-server software to web-based software, transposing their procurement process online. They conducted in-depth ROI studies to justify the initial cost of replacing existing systems. Twenty years later, the return on investment is obvious, but many companies considered risk as significant at the time.

I believe we will continue to see more companies in more industries in 2018 examining how blockchain technology can generate efficiencies (and potentially new business models in the future) .

When I launched Future Perfect Ventures in 2014 around the thesis of decentralization, I was very excited about the combination of the blockchain with other emerging technologies, particularly the machine learning / AI, security and the internet of things. In this way, I think 2018 will be the year we begin to see the convergence of these technologies to truly create the decentralized computing and communications platforms of the future.

Decentralization, by its very nature, requires that more intelligence moves to nodes instead of residing in a central server.

We will continue to see the development of semiconductors capable of advanced calculations in smaller and smaller devices. As peripheral devices become smarter, smart contracts enabled by blockchain platforms will work better with more advanced data analysis capabilities.

I see a mini-brain in each of our devices, ranging from simplistic ones to those capable of processing larger datasets and making decisions based on those data.

The increased availability of more data and smarter processing at the nodes will allow larger data sets to be offered to more businesses and people, rather than to proprietary companies such as Facebook and Google. More importantly, these data will be diverse and representative of the world in which we live, instead of being filtered by a few companies residing in the same geography.

Although this does not happen all over the next year, we have begun an inevitable march towards this future, which will be even more transformative than the Internet.

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