Most people still think of Bitcoin as the virtual currency used by drug dealers and shadowy hackers looking to evade the authorities.

But the innovations that helped turn Bitcoin into the most popular virtual currency now are being viewed as a potentially enormous disruptive force for several industries, including accounting, music and law.

Nowhere, though, are more resources and money being spent on the technology than on Wall Street — the very industry that Bitcoin was created to circumvent.

“There is so much pull and interest on this right now,” said Derek White, the chief digital officer at Barclays, the British global bank, which has a team of employees working on about 20 experiments that explore how the technology underlying Bitcoin might change finance. “That comes from a recognition that, ‘Wow, we can use this to change the fundamental model of how we operate to create our future.’”

For people such as White, Bitcoin isn’t just a digital token to use for online purchases. Instead, many of the top minds in finance have come to believe the software that brought the virtual currency into existence also enables a fundamentally new way of transacting and maintaining records online — allowing people and banks to directly exchange money and assets such as stocks and bonds without having to rely on a long chain of expensive middlemen.

A few banks have gone public with their work, but most of the activity has been happening behind the scenes. At one private meeting, held in April at one of the Manhattan offices of Bank of America, executives from more than a dozen large banks gathered to confidentially discuss how the technology underlying Bitcoin could be used to change foreign currency trading, the largest financial market in the world, according to people who attended the meeting.

Central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have their own teams looking at the technology.

“A year ago, it was more of an idea,” said Max Neukirchen, the head of corporate strategy at JPMorgan Chase. “Now, it is a real opportunity. You test it and realize that this can play a big role in our thinking about how our own infrastructure will evolve.”

This is a long way from the derision that many bankers — including JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon — expressed when Bitcoin burst into the public consciousness in 2013, when the price of a Bitcoin was bouncing around wildly in a speculative frenzy often compared to the Dutch tulip bulb mania.

The institutions that are becoming involved now are generally not interested in selling goods for Bitcoins or owning the virtual currency. They are, instead, looking at the network and software that make it possible for Bitcoin to move around the world instantly, and almost free.

The Bitcoin network is run by a decentralized network of users who jointly keep track of transactions and update the records in real time, with no single user or company in charge. The records of all transactions are kept on a public ledger — essentially just a big, publicly available spreadsheet — known as the blockchain that is visible to anyone and has, at least so far, proven impossible to tamper with.

“We believe that blockchain technology holds great promise in allowing capital markets to operate more efficiently while simultaneously providing greater transparency and security, all of which are fundamental to the public interest,” Nasdaq’s chief executive, Robert Greifeld, said in a July call with investors.