Bitcoin, the revolutionary technological innovation, is becoming old hat. Even while investors and regulators are paying much more attention (and more money) to the technological architecture underpinning the cryptocurrency, a funny thing is happening: Bitcoin, the very reason for that architecture, is often going completely unmentioned. That's not to say that bitcoin is becoming less popular as a means of exchange or a store of value — it's price in U.S. dollars is hovering near a one-year high — but people are increasingly showing much more interest in other potential applications of secure distributed ledgers (also called blockchains), which have nothing to do with money. It's that innovation — the blockchain — that allows for the bitcoin network's global functioning. It securely records information publicly, and concurrently hosts those records on separate computers. And while many have argued that a blockchain is fundamentally insecure without bitcoin's diverse network participants incentivized by monetary reward, not everyone agrees.

"For currency and as a financial rail, bitcoin is the only game in town," said Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group, which oversees 68 companies in the virtual currency and associated technologies space. "But as a ledger, I think that most of the efforts underway by the banks are using permissioned or federated blockchain solutions." In other words, as financial institutions grow to appreciate the efficiencies they can achieve through the technology — cutting out the middlemen of data transfer while keeping information secure — they're opting to keep everything in house. This trend, Silbert said, is because the firms want to make sure their systems will be scalable, easily audited and definitely around in 30 years. (Bitcoin's future remains in flux, especially as some of its biggest developers battle over the details of its protocol.) The blockchain-sans-bitcoin discussion was exemplified on Tuesday when Commodity Futures Trading Commission Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo spoke at length about the potential of DLT (digital ledger technology) before the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s Blockchain Symposium. Despite singing the praises of blockchains, he neglected to mention bitcoin once in his official transcript. "It will have profound implications for global financial markets by increasing settlement efficiency and speed, linking recordkeeping networks, reducing transaction costs and increasing market access," Giancarlo said, according to a transcript of his remarks. "It will broadly impact financial markets in payments, banking, securities settlement, title recording, cyber security and trade reporting and analysis." The shift in focus to non-bitcoin DLT's can also be seen in the massive increase in the price of "ether" — a digital token, not the organic compounds. This token, which serves as a sort of "fuel" for the blockchain-based application platform Ethereum, broke above $14 earlier this month after beginning the year under $1.