Math money.

Whether devotee or skeptic, crypto-currency is seldom if ever boring - although both interest and value alike have ebbed substantially since the new year. Of the over 1,400 cryptocurrencies on offer, the big boys on the block make up three-quarters of the value (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple) and have declined 49%, 71%, 60% and 40% respectively.

That’s value. What about interest? According to the Bloomberg: searches for bitcoin fell 82 percent from December highs; tweets that mention the coin are down to about half their all-time peak. And the number of bitcoin transactions is off 60 percent from its record high last year.

Notwithstanding Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s belief that, as he put it recently: “the world ultimately will have a single currency…I personally believe that will be bitcoin”, cryptoficcianados have had a challenging week. Reuters reported that despite Jack’s plug, Twitter Inc. will start banning cryptocurrency advertising, joining Facebook and Google, effective immediately. The impetus is a clampdown that seeks to avoid giving publicity to potential fraud or large investor losses. Coinbase also reported that Reddit no longer accepts payment in bitcoin for its Reddit membership program.

Meanwhile, wider employment of blockchain in the financial industry has suffered what appears to be a series of major setbacks. Reuters reports that three separate projects undertaken by financial institutions to incorporate the distributed ledger technology have been halted.

One such example is the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, known as Wall Street’s bookkeeper, having recently put the brakes on a blockchain system for the clearing and settlement of repurchase agreement transactions (repos).

Says Murray Pozmanter, head of clearing agency services at the DTCC: we shelved the project because banks and other potential users believed the same results could be achieved more cheaply using current technology. “Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem”.