The price of bitcoin could nosedive to zero, a top investor in the crypto space told CNBC during a debate, which focused on the future of the underlying technology known as blockchain. Cryptocurrencies had a wild year in 2018, with over $480 billion of value wiped off the entire market, according to data from Coinmarketcap. After hitting a record high in 2017, bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, fell dramatically. It was trading at $3,571 at around 11.15 a.m. London time Wednesday. Some experts believe it could go even lower. "I do believe it will go to zero. I think it's a great technology but I don't believe it's a currency. It's not based on anything," Jeff Schumacher, founder of BCG Digital Ventures, said during a CNBC-hosted panel in Davos, Switzerland. Schumacher is a big investor in blockchain-focused companies. During the debate, Glenn Hutchins, chairman of North Island, said bitcoin's role in the future may be focused on being a store of value. "It might be that the role of bitcoin in the system could be to bring value back, to hold your value there while you have tokens that have other use cases that you aren't using at the moment," Hutchins said.

He added, as did the other panelists, including 500 Startups Partner Edith Yeung, and Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, that the focus for him as an investor is on the underlying technology known as blockchain. "I am much less interested in investing around bitcoin as a currency unit or a currency equivalent, or even the blockchain as an accounting ledger. I am thinking much more about the protocols. In other words, what is the underlying protocol going to do as a consequence of which, which tokens are valuable or not," Hutchins said.

A visual representation of the digital cryptocurrency bitcoin. Yu Chun Christopher Wong | S3studio | Getty Images

In the case of bitcoin, the blockchain is a decentralized public ledger of activity, that is not owned by any individual. Instead, it is maintained by a network of people running specialized computers to solve complex cryptographic problems. But bitcoin has many issues including slow transaction times with a high cost. Schumacher said the industry is now trying to create "open decentralized systems." These would essentially be next generation protocols or infrastructure that businesses could run on, similar to cloud computing today.

Blockchain adoption