The financial world, which is as rich with jargon as Warren Buffett is with Benjamins, has a way of heaping its verbal tangles on befuddled investors. Like: bespoke tranche. And: UAFRS adjusted financials. And: EBITA, which might be more easily taken for a Broadway musical than something shareholders should scrutinize.

At least those terms, troubling as they might sound, translate easily in the end. But when it comes to one of the most revolutionary advancements to sweep the financial industry — blockchain — any effort to explain and understand it proves just as befuddling to experts as novices. And some of the metaphors that work aren’t exactly comforting.

“A good way to illustrate the power of blockchain is by viewing it as an extension of ‘software eating the world,'” says Bhavana Yarasuri, a financial technology analyst at ETF provider ARK Invest in Palo Alto, California.

[See: 9 Investing Steps ffrom Warren Buffett’s Playbook.]

Yarasuri predicts “permissionless blockchains,” such as the digital currencies bitcoin and ethereum, “will be more valuable, given their ability to create trust and scale.”

Experts agree that once you get a grip on blockchain, tentative as it may feel, you’ll begin to understand a force that could drive 21st century investment like nothing before it — even though blockchain is less than 10 years old.

One way to understand blockchain is to look at those two mysterious currencies that Yarasuri cites. Bitcoin and ethereum are what’s known as “cryptocurrencies” — money that only exists digitally, without a central bank or government to monitor it. But if that’s the case, how do bitcoin and ethereum get bought and sold?

The answer is blockchain, which you can think of as the rails upon which bitcoin and ethereum ride. Simple as that analogy might seem, here’s what happens when you try to define it in the closest thing to layman’s terms:

Blockchain is a fully public digital ledger of economic transactions and contains two types of records: transactions and blocks. Blocks hold batches of transactions. The blocks are time stamped and link to a previous block. And blocks cannot be corrupted because the transactions cannot be altered retroactively — even though, we should point out, all the action on blockchain action is initiated via computers, which are as routinely hacked as flimsy bike locks on a Manhattan street.

Then again, how many investors made wealthy on major automobile companies can tell you exactly how an internal combustion engine works? You don’t necessarily need to understand blockchain to make serious returns on it.

Bitcoin and ethereum, for example, have experienced astronomical price run-ups over their respective histories. Let’s say you bought $8 worth of bitcoin in 2010, when it was worth 8 cents. Those 100 bitcoins today would be worth more than $265,000. Take that, Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN).

Even if you’d bought a single bitcoin just two years ago at about $250, you’d be 10 times better off today, as that bitcoin was worth $2,688 as of late Friday. Meanwhile ethereum, though much younger, now trades at $217. In March, when it first started to reach public consciousness, it was worth $19.

Yet both these currencies, still largely driven by speculation, have been known to wipe out investors with their wild fluctuations — not the stuff of rollercoasters, but rockets plunging through the stratosphere. In December 2013, bitcoin lost more than half its value of $1,150 in just 18 days.

“These currencies are extremely speculative and hard to value, thus they present a very big risk to individual investors,” says Brent M. Wilsey, who owns and operates San Diego-based Wilsey Asset Management. “A safer investment to profit from improvements in blockchain would be larger financial institutions.”

[See: High-Tech Investing: 7 Sectors to Watch.]

Thus as large banks such as Citigroup ( C) and JPMorgan Chase ( JPM) get into blockchain, they could provide a more stabilizing effect and harness its growth in less volatile ways.

On a smaller scale, this is already happening. On July 12, Falcon Private Bank, in cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse AG, became the first Swiss bank to directly offer bitcoin and crypto asset management to high-net-worth clients.

Who else stands to win with blockchain? “Microsoft ( MSFT) and IBM ( IBM), among others, are at the back end of this market-wide transformation, rapidly enhancing their cloud and ‘everything as a service’ offerings,” says Geraldine Balaj, global distributed ledger tech lead at Capgemini and based in New York City. This will allow “large-scale integration and interoperability between various [business] ecosystems.”

And those businesses that learn to use it, and cut costs with it, could score big. In terms of sending payments worldwide, for example, blockchain cuts the timing to minutes, compared to the days it now takes with conventional methods.

To that end, the corporate movement toward blockchain has begun, and executives are bullish. WEX ( WEX), a billion-dollar global payments firm, reports in its payment trends survey that half of CFOs expect blockchain or similar “distributed ledger technologies” to change how their accounts payable operate in the next six to 12 months — while another 44 percent believe it will allow their business to scale more quickly and internationally.

Meanwhile, “margin growth over the next decade will come from huge cost reallocation and decline in operations and technology expense,” says Simon Moss, managing director of Grant Thornton’s Financial Services Advisory based in New York City. “So it’s not necessarily from direct new business, new products or alpha creation.”

Indeed, those efficiencies may work in unexpected ways. The blocks in a blockchain can hold information on contracts, and that makes it a powerful storehouse and permanent record keeper for industries bogged down by the vagaries of paperwork.

“For the insurance industry, this completely changes the way insurance contracts are written,” says Evan Tarver, investments analyst at FitSmallBusiness.com. “As of now, you have to file a claim and work with your insurance company to get the right coverage. With the blockchain, however, you can code the contract directly, so that any time an event took place that fell under the coverage of an insurance policy, payment would happen automatically.”

So what happens now? Experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before blockchain permanently changes the way business is done — and that the businesses and investors who get there first will reap the rewards.

[See: 11 Ways to Buy Bank Stocks.]

“We believe blockchain will become a central infrastructure for ‘efficient asset utilization’ such as to rent out a car when not in use,” Yarasuri says.

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How to Unlock Blockchain’s Investment Potential originally appeared on usnews.com