After the turmoil over the infamous implosion of the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX has begun to calm down, one of the crypto exchange’s major investors and previously very vocal supporters, Kevin O’Leary, said there was a silver lining out of this event.
Indeed, commenting on the collapse of FTX, O’Leary said he didn’t expect a lot more news or dialogue to come out of it except about recovery, but that the positive thing about it was that it had stirred the decision-makers in Washington, as he told Stansberry Research’s Daniela Cambone in an interview streamed on February 3.
According to the star of the television show “Shark Tank”:
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“The whole narrative at FTX now is about recovery. If there’s one silver lining in this whole FTX thing, it’s the fact that it poked the bear in Washington.”
Specifically, he said he was getting countless calls from senators and congresspeople “interested in pushing the agenda on policy and regulation around digital payment systems,” which made him believe that “we’re going to be in a much better place within 12 to 14 months because it’s a bipartisan effort.”
Future of crypto
In O’Leary’s view, there are bound to be several more bankruptcies “just to clean [the crypto sector] out of all the terrible managers and fraudsters” within the next three years, but that “our rogue days are behind us.”
“They’re going to keep going bankrupt because they’re so full of rogue players and (…) fraudsters. (…) Everybody’s tired of it, it’s just setting back the potential of what crypto and digital payment systems could be.”
Instead, he believes, “it’s going to be the new disciplined players that come out of the banking system to run the crypto markets, and they’ll work within compliance, and it’ll be something that’ll grow, and I believe will still become the 12th sector of the S&P.”
Referring to the statements of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, who previously expressed his scathing views of Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto, calling them “gambling contracts with a nearly 100% edge for the house,” O’Leary said:
“Bitcoin’s never going to go away. This crypto is software, there’s nothing nefarious about software. The software didn’t do anything wrong, it’s the people that were abusing it, misusing it, and frauding with it, and the bad actors, they’re going to be gone.”
Having said that, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Mike McGlone has suggested that cryptocurrencies could be “facing their first real recession,” the last of which earlier gave rise to Bitcoin itself, which is why he believes that similar milestones could be expected this time around, as Finbold reported.
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