The prices of bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have come down a lot this year, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road for the blockchain. The applications for blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies are nearly endless, but investors may have a difficult time determining where to invest to get a piece of the blockchain pie.

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Total addressable market for blockchain

Every so often, investment banks will offer up some suggestions. This time it’s Bank of America Merrill Lynch with a list of suggested stocks that could benefit from the blockchain trend at some point in the future.

In a recent note by a large team led by analyst Kash Rangan, BAML pegged the total addressable market for the blockchain at about $7 billion. On the surface, that seems like a rather arbitrary number, especially given that the firm doesn’t commit to putting an estimated timeframe on it. The big problem is that there are many different ways to estimate the market for blockchain.

BAML’s analysis is based on average selling price per server per year, the number of servers installed worldwide, and the percentage of servers which are running blockchain. The firm’s model assumes 2% of the world’s servers run blockchain for a value of $5,500 per server per year.

IDC estimated the blockchain market at $735.6 million last year; the firm pegs the market at $10.9 billion by 2022. IDC expects that within the next two years, one-quarter of the world’s top banks, 30% of retailers and manufacturers, and 20% of healthcare organizations will be using blockchain.

Monetizing blockchain technology

Another clear issue in estimating the value of the blockchain market is that it’s still unclear just how blockchain services could be monetized. While numerous analysts and experts have outlined a wide variety of potential use cases for the technology, actually monetizing those use cases is still a bit of a mystery. However, BAML analysts have some suggestions.