Financial advisors haven't quite embraced cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies, but Ric Edelman is on a mission to make sure advisors are at least educated about them.

Toward that end, Edelman, the chairman of Edelman Financial Engines, recently announced the creation of the Advisor Blockchain and Cryptoasset Council (ABCC), a group focused on getting financial advisors up to speed on the emerging technology.

Through a series of live events and conferences, Edelman said he hopes to show advisors that, despite the dramatic ups and downs of cryptocurrencies over the past year, it's important to be able to answer clients' questions about blockchain and cryptoassets with a base of knowledge.

At the same time, he acknowledged that the advisory community is wary about the crypto universe.

"Yes, there is skepticism," Edelman said in an interview on Wednesday. "It is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction about crypto when you see it rise 1,500 percent one year and fall 87 pecent the next. ... It's easy to dismiss as a fad or, worse, a fraud."

But Edelman cautioned that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies shouldn't be regarded by advisors as the Beanie Babies of the investment world.

"This is not a fad -- it is not going away," he said.

Among the messages that ABCC will try to convey to advisors is that blockchain technology, touted as a secure, decentralized ledger that is maintained over a peer-to-peer network, can dramatically reduce costs in the delivery of financial services, reduce the time it takes to execute transactions and increase the safety of those transactions, he said.

This is reflected in the fact that virtually every major bank in the world is developing blockchain technologies, while governments work on the sometimes frustrating task of trying to regulate assets and currencies based off blockchain, Edelman said.

Already, he said, blockchain has made it possible for companies to transfer money overseas in a matter of minutes at a tiny cost, when not too long ago such transfers normally took days at a high cost.

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