A new era. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, which has much benefited from ethereum’s rising GPU demand, said “Crypto is a real thing — it’s not going to go away,” before adding:

“This year, the world is starting to come to terms with the existence of crypto. It’s based on blockchain, and it’s very secure and very low overhead.

I think there’s clearly real utility. It’s a real phenomenon, and so everyone is coming to terms with it. I’m not against the concept of virtual currency — it’s as real as virtual goods, and video games.

And as you know, tens of millions of virtual goods are created and shared and sold in virtual reality, and people invest thousands of hours to create space ships in space that they battle against each other. So, the concept of virtual goods and virtual worlds and virtual currency all ties together.”

Those virtual goods are tied to physical goods in the case of crypto, with increasing demand for GPUs – of which ethereum mining accounts for some 70% in this space – sending them out of stock.

That has led to an ever increasing price of Nvidia’s stocks, which recently reported better than expected earnings in the fourth quarter of 2017.

But it’s not just the wider world that has to come to terms with crypto. It’s also this space which has to come to term with cryptos going mainstream.

As we reported earlier, an established financial services provider has started mining Bitcoin Cash. Coinbase Commerce might start giving PayPal a run for its money. US states are now in a jurisdictional competition with each other, on top of nation states, and all that is not even the tip of the iceberg.

“Clearly, there’s a lot of talk about crypto,” Huang says. “And crypto was a real part of our business this past quarter, even though small, overall.”

It’s not size that matters, but the potential, and with some senators saying the crypto market cap could rise to $20 trillion, that potential might be significant indeed.

Which means this space, and the wider world, is very quickly changing now that a realization has set in. A new era, thus, is upon us.