Mentions of “cryptocurrency” (digital currencies not tied to any country’s legal tender) and related terms including “bitcoin” and “ethereum” (the two most popular cryptocurrencies), “blockchain” (the technology underlying these currencies), and “initial coin offering” (or ICO, which lets companies raise capital through the creation of a new cryptocurrency) have skyrocketed over the last seven years, according to data from Sentieo, a financial research firm.

In total, 1,200 publicly traded companies have generated over 12,000 mentions of digital currency during the past 14 years.

With another month left to go in 2017, references to cryptocurrency in corporate communications are already double what they were in all of 2016, according to a Fortune analysis of the Sentieo data. And they’re up more than 7,000 percent since 2010, when admittedly only a handful of companies had talked about “digital currency” during earnings calls or presentations.

It began with ‘digital currency’ … and getting bitcoin’s name wrong

From 2009 through 2012, most of the mentions only referenced “digital currency,” which includes cryptocurrencies, along with other money recorded electronically or stored in another device. Players in the digital currency space, like PayPal and Square, had to address cryptocurrencies earlier than most.

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