Kevin O’Leary is angry.
The entrepreneur and Shark Tank co-host invested millions in and was a paid spokesperson for FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange embroiled in fraud allegations run by Sam Bankman-Fried.
“I’m one pissed-off cowboy,” O’Leary told attendees of Benzinga’s Future of Crypto conference on Wednesday. “I’ve got a lot of lawyers, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this.”
O’Leary, along with fellow panelist and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, argued SBF himself isn’t the problem. O’Leary has said repeatedly in interviews that he would invest in SBF again, presuming he isn’t convicted of fraud.
In his view, this issue is a lack of regulation in the US. Part of the reason FTX was able to become one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world was because of its American presence, he said.
When O’Leary first got into the crypto sector the expectation was that “at some point over the next 18 to 36 months we would get regulation. And where would I want to be? I’d want to be on an American platform when that occurred, regulated by an American regulator.”
“This is the patina of what FTX is and was,” he added. “It was the American version.”
Now, regulators will have to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with FTX, which allegedly spent $100 million on luxury vacation homes and lost $1 billion in customer funds in the days after its bankruptcy, according to Reuters.
Ultimately, O’Leary predicts a consolidation is coming for crypto in the US. There are about 10,000 coins in existence today. The number that will matter going forward is about 10, while the rest, he said, “are shitcoins.”
“As regulation comes, [there will be] a lot more capital chasing a lot fewer positions,” he said. “Which means capital appreciation has tremendous potential over the next three years.”
“It'll be down to probably 10 tokens that I will be investing in.”
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel