Davos World Economic Forum: Insights from the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Debate

Cryptocurrency, despite the massive drop in value from a year prior, was still a hot topic of discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Experts on cryptocurrency and blockchain debated the technology in the panel "Building a Sustainable Crypto-Architecture" with insight into both sides of the discussion.

The moderator, Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, started off the discussion with Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, who said that the cryptocurrencies in the last year were a "Classic bubble." He said there was "Zero chance" that crypto would overtake fiat as a widely used currency.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was Jeremy Allaire, the founder and CEO of Circle, who made the bull case for widespread use of cryptocurrencies.

"You can talk about bitcoin specifically and debate whether or not a non-sovereign, confidential, uncensorable form of money is valuable to the world. It clearly is valuable to the world, it's being valued, there are active markets."

Even within the East African Economic Community, to make a transfer between Kenyan schillings and Ugandan schillings can take D2 and cost you seven percent.

Zhu Ning, a professor at Tsinghua University noted that the Chinese regulators viewed cryptocurrencies dimly because they see it as a way to circumvent capital flow controls and that it's risky for consumers.

Blockchain was less controversial than cryptocurrency, though the extent that smart contract platforms would be adoption was in contention.

The debate over the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain is not one that will likely soon be resolved.

Though the topic was much less discussed than it was a year ago at the height of the crypto markets, it seems likely to come up in future editions of the World Economic Forum at Davos.