Ethereum’s story began in Jamaica. Lubin, a former midlevel Goldman Sachs executive who had built a business representing musicians, was on the island with a client when he read a white paper about how Ethereum would work. He got in touch with the paper’s author, Vitalik Buterin, now 24 years old, and in 2015 set up shop in Brooklyn.

Cryptocurrencies have been around since 2009, when the elusive figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of Bitcoin, then went public by linking to a British newspaper article forecasting a second U.K. bank bailout. The first Bitcoin bubble hit four years later, and a much bigger one blew up last year, driven at least in part by South Koreans’ worries that a nuclear bomb might obliterate the nation’s banks. Ethereum was the first digital currency firm to take hold in New York, where many business power brokers remain highly skeptical of the entire enterprise.

The most prominent critic is JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who last year called Bitcoin a “fraud” and later said it has “no actual value.” One reason Dimon may feel that way is some investors are now using credit cards and even mortgaging their homes to buy Bitcoin. So if the currency plunges, there could be widespread defaults that sap the earnings of his bank and others.

One commonly shared view was articulated in December by Dutch bank ING Group. “One day, beyond the hype, Bitcoin will return to being the niche product that it was in its initial years,” the bank said in a client report, according to Business Insider. “Users will include tech nerds, people obsessed about their privacy, people afraid for (hyper)inflation in traditional currencies, and people wanting to circumvent central banks for ideological or criminal reasons.”

Still, the city’s financial establishment is grudgingly adapting. A Bitcoin futures market is now open, and the New York Stock Exchange’s owner recently said it is preparing to share Bitcoin trading prices with institutional investors. “My job is to get that shiny new toy—Bitcoin—on our network,” one trading executive said.

Digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum all rely on blockchain technology, a cryptography- protected electronic ledger of continuously maintained and verified transactions shared by users on computer servers. Blockchain does have potentially useful applications for big databases, which explains why JPMorgan, despite Dimon’s dismissals of Bitcoin, is using the technology to help process certain global payments. Microsoft uses the Ethereum platform to help track supply chains.

As a business proposition, blockchain is still in its infancy and enduring plenty of growing pains. Late last year, traffic on Ethereum slowed considerably after an app called CryptoKitties debuted and gained a huge following among Asian teenagers. They were taken with the cartoon cats, whose unique “cattributes” were useful for verifying Ethereum transactions. Though it disrupted trading, Miley said the craze helped introduce scores of new users to Ethereum.

Only six cryptocurrency companies are licensed to do business in New York, and consulting firm Blockchain Driven estimated in December that just 932 people in the city work for blockchain-related businesses. But Blockchain Driven also said “it is fair to assume” that number will rise to 10,000 by 2027.

That might sound like more irrational exuberance, but money is pouring in. Venture capitalists invested a record $1 billion in crypto startups last year, according to Pitchbook. Flatiron District–based Chainalysis, which specializes in tracking Bitcoin transactions for financial institutions and law enforcement, has 60 employees and is looking to hire 40 more in the coming months, a spokeswoman said. Chronicled launched in 2014 as a blockchain company verifying the authenticity of sneakers and handbags, and uses the technology to track pharmaceuticals. The firm now wants to expand into food and use blockchain to track items such as lobsters from fishing boats to restaurants.

“We have 30 employees,” said co-founder Samantha Radocchia, “and 25 job openings.”

Of course, cryptomania has little to do with improving the financial world’s plumbing. Instead, it’s largely seen as the magic formula that allows anyone with enough computing power to become a modern-day alchemist turning code into currency beyond any government’s control.

Bitcoin and its brethren present a mass Rorschach test. The community of believers is still pretty small—22 million people hold some amount of Bitcoin, according to blockchain.info—but it is growing fast, with the number of accounts doubling in the past year. Most are small investors passionate in their certainty that Bitcoin or something like it represents the future of finance. That group includes Sergeline Bernardeau, a songwriter and real estate broker in TriBeCa who in 2016 started learning about Bitcoin, or, as she put it, “going down the rabbit hole.”

“Some say it’s a bubble,” Bernardeau said, “and some say it’s the biggest transfer of wealth in history.”