Like a proverbial teenager, it appears that bitcoin has finally emerged from a “sin”-filled puberty.

A new study has found that the popular digital currency has already matured to a point that its market no longer relies on illegal activities to drum up business. The study was authored by researchers from the central bank of Germany, University College London and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

According to a CoinDesk report, which quoted the yet-to-be-released study, bitcoin has already passed through “three distinct phases of growth as a distributed payment system.”

Bitcoin’s most recent stage, according to the researchers, allows the cryptocurrency to be driven by “legitimate payments, commerce and services,” a far cry from its days spent on the dark side of the internet.