Kevin O'Leary says he has resumed buying crypto positions for the next market cycle and is watching for the first major stock exchange to adopt a blockchain, an event he calls a watershed moment for the industry. He also weighed in on the stalled CLARITY Act, digital-asset tax policy, and how much Bitcoin institutions might eventually hold.
O'Leary bets on the next cycle
Speaking with The Block at the Avalanche Summit in New York, the O'Leary Ventures chairman said he has resumed buying new crypto positions for the next cycle. His focus now is finding which blockchain a major industry will standardize on, rather than picking individual coins.
He said he talks directly with chief executives across sectors about which blockchain their companies are evaluating, but according to The Block: "none of them are saying the same thing." He described the first major stock exchange to adopt a blockchain as a watershed moment, arguing the wider financial system would then need infrastructure that meets that exchange's requirements.
Exchanges are already moving onchain
The New York Stock Exchange has been building onchain settlement infrastructure for tokenized securities, and its parent, Intercontinental Exchange, has agreed to invest in tZERO and license its blockchain patents. Nasdaq took a separate route: Nasdaq Ventures agreed to invest $100 million in Kraken parent Payward at a $21 billion valuation, with the companies expecting Nasdaq Equity Tokens to launch in the second quarter of 2027. Regulators are preparing for more of this activity: the SEC granted tokenized-securities venues a five-year exemption to trade eligible tokenized U.S. stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools.
Regulation stalls, Bitcoin's ceiling holds
O'Leary does not expect the CLARITY Act to pass before the midterms, after the Senate's cloture motion fell short 50 votes to 49 of the 60 needed to open formal debate. Still, he argued that lawmakers writing tax policy for digital assets would want more regulation, not less, pointing toward the House Ways and Means Committee's 38-to-5 vote advancing the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act on Sept. 16.
On Bitcoin, O'Leary sees the asset eventually reaching 1% to 3% of institutional alternative-asset allocations, a range he compares with existing institutional gold holdings. He said his AI-related bets sit in power infrastructure rather than in the models themselves, citing projects in Norway, Finland, Alberta and Utah, plus uranium.
Sources: The Block, crypto.news
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