The debate over the future of cryptocurrencies continued Thursday with a group meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, decrying a bubble. Yet at the same time, millennial-focused stock market app Robinhood announced that it would add no-free trading support for cryptocurrency trading in the near future.

A Davos session called “The Crypto-Asset Bubble” featured a discussion among a variety of financial experts. Most of them slammed bitcoin’s future, though some admitted that the blockchain technology underpinning it had other uses.

Leading the pack was Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller, who told the session that bitcoin will not be a “permanent feature” of the financial world while admitting that it was a “really clever idea.”

“I tend to think of bitcoin as an experiment. It is an interesting experiment, but it’s not a permanent feature of our lives,” Shiller said. “We are over-emphasizing bitcoin, we should expand it out to blockchain, which will have other applications.”

Radian Partners Principal Jennifer Zhu Scott didn’t hold back, saying that she believed that “in my view, cryptocurrencies – bitcoin and the others – they don’t meet the criteria for money. They can be called an asset, but they’re not a stable store of value, they fluctuate a lot, and you can’t use them as a medium of exchange.”

Providing a contrary view, Neil Rimer, Index Ventures’ general partner and co-founder, told the audience that bitcoin was “one of the most audacious, generous and profound inventions” that he has ever seen and that it was still in its early days. “We’re nine years into this experiment,” he said. “It’s gone well at times and quite poorly. It could fail completely and go to zero, but it has accomplished a number of things I think are remarkable.”

Also today, Robinhood Financial LLC announced that it would be adding support for zero-fee trading in bitcoin and Ethereum starting from next month. Customers will also be able to add tracking of 16 other cryptocurrencies, including Ripple XRP and Litecoin, to their “watchlist” feature.

The ability to trade cryptocurrencies via Robinhood will be limited initially to users in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire. with additional states to be added in future as the company gains regulatory approval.

Support for trading in other cryptocurrencies may be on the table in future as well. A spokesperson told Coindesk the company had established a “listing committee” to analyze factors such as security, functionality and demand to assess cryptocurrencies that could be added to the trading functionality or the market data list.

Photo: WEF