In the high-stakes world of venture-backed startups, not growing is the same as dying. Historically, stalled companies sought a sympathetic acquirer or quietly shut down. Now, startups have a new potential lifeline: They pivot to blockchain.

Kik kicked things off in September. The messaging app, which has struggled under competition from Facebook and Instagram, created its own cryptocurrency called Kin, which can be used to buy and sell things via the Kik app today, and other apps in the future. The company sold tokens for the project, raising nearly $100 million from institutional and individual investors. Since then, a flood of startups, including Skedaddle, an “Uber for buses” company, and Loomia, a wearables company, has followed suit.

Take Listia, a peer-to-peer marketplace for exchanging goods. The site experienced early success after launching in 2009, amassing 10 million registered users and raising $11 million from well-known venture firms General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. But in the past year, the company cut its marketing budget in order to turn a profit, which meant its growth stalled. “We had a business that was working but wasn’t growing as fast as everyone wanted,” says co-founder Gee-Hwan Chuang.

Over the summer, Chuang and his team began to explore how Listia might participate in the excitement swirling around cryptocurrencies. The company already had a virtual currency, called Listia Credits, which people use to buy and trade goods on its platform. Listia even allowed users to trade bitcoin. Turning Listia Credits into a cryptocurrency would take things to the next level.

Listia began building a blockchain-based platform called Ink Protocol, which will offer smart contracts (an automatic way to strike deals without a third party), payments, and reputation data that can be used on marketplaces beyond Listia. Once it launches later this year, Ink Protocol will employ a cryptocurrency called XNK and keep track of all transactions and feedback with blockchain technology. The company announced the plan in September, and collected around $1 million from pre-sales of its tokens to investors. The firm plans to sell more tokens to the public when the platform is finished.

The rush by startups into cryptocurrencies mirrors similar moves among publicly traded companies, where shares of several cheap, thinly traded stocks have spiked after merely adding the word bitcoin or blockchain to their names. (Even the stock price of the parent company of Hooters leapt nearly 50% at the mere mention of blockchain in a press release.) The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken note, halting trading in some cases, because of the risks these currencies posed to inexperienced investors.

The crypto game is complex, volatile, and lacks clearly defined legal protections. At startups, there are risks for both investors and the companies themselves. Investors risk holding a worthless currency---typical in the world of high-risk startups, but many ICOs are raising money from outside the world of typical startup investors. Meanwhile the companies are even more dependent than venture-backed startups on maintaining confidence in the enterprise, because few have launched their projects, meaning they need to convince employees, customers, suppliers, and others to support a currency that’s not yet worth anything.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of cryptocurrency and payments company Ripple, has noted the uptick in “tourists” in the sector. “If you have a business and a business model and you’re trying to figure out how to put a token in it, that’s the wrong way to think about it,” he says. “If there is a usefulness of a token and it has utility, then people are going to demand a usage for that. But don’t retrofit your business to try to offer a token to raise capital because the traditional capital markets are not interested in what you are doing.”