The co-founder of the world’s second biggest cryptocurrency is not afraid of comparisons to the dot-com bubble.

Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Wednesday that the companies currently latching onto blockchain technology will eventually be weeded out in a similar fashion to the survivors of the 1990s internet boom.

“The companies that are providing real value will be the ones that are going to last through. It’s the same thing we had with the internet with the dot-com bubble… We saw with the internet with the Amazons and the Googles, [value-providing companies] will be the ones that emerge and provide value to people,” Di Iorio said.

“Value is: Are they providing a service that improves people’s lives? That’s really what innovation is. Are you doing something that [is] solving a problem?”

Di Iorio – who was in Toronto as a keynote speaker of the blockchain focused Futurist Conference – said that price fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market are a result of the level of innovation in the space. He says the technology is more important in the long-run than the value of any one given currency.

Cryptocurrencies have been on a wild ride in the past several months. Bitcoin – the largest cryptocurrency by market value – is currently trading around US$6,000 after falling from a high of nearly US$20,000 in December.

“It’s very early on right now,” he said. “There are people that are checking these markets every day. They’re seeing things go up and down wildly, and what that’s showing is there’s a lot of innovation happening.  There’s a lot of infrastructure being grown here and the pricing is not a really important thing.”

“The currency side of things is the first application of these technologies.”

As for those applications, Di Iorio believes that the biggest change could affect companies that connect people to services they need. Citing Uber and Airbnb as examples, he said that blockchain-based technology could eventually cut out that middle man.

“Any company that provides a service to connect individuals, technology is coming along to replace that and make things faster.”