Bitcoin and cryptocurrency price predictions have been coming thick and fast in recent months—with Tesla
TSLA
The bitcoin price rally that catapulted the world’s largest cryptocurrency to a value of over $1 trillion has stalled in recent months, however, with the bitcoin price slipping under $50,000 and giving bitcoin a market capitalization of around $900 billion.
Now, celebrity investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has said he expects “another trillion dollars worth of buying” into bitcoin and plans to raise his exposure to crypto to 7% by the end of 2021, up from 3% currently.
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Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary has said he expects a lot more money to flow into bitcoin and … [+]
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“This is not going away, this is the new asset class,” O’Leary told CNBC this week, prediting there will be “trillions of dollars of interest waiting to come on board” to cryptocurrencies with a “another trillion dollars worth of [bitcoin] buying” when regulators ultimately name bitcoin and crypto an institutional asset class.
However, O’Leary did warn that though he expects regulators to recognize cryptocurrencies as an institutional asset class, he’s not sure when it will happen.
“I don’t want to get involved in crypto if the regulator says it’s not okay,” O’Leary said. “I can’t afford to be offside, I cannot afford to be non-compliant.”
This week, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler has called for more resources to better manage the nasent crypto industry and markets that he’s compared to the “Wild West” after suggestions the regulator is failing to protect investors.
But O’Leary is confident he will be putting more money into bitcoin and crypto. “I want to raise my exposure to crypto—currently at 3%—to 7% by the end of the year,” he added.
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O’Leary, who said as recently as 2019 that bitcoin is “garbage” and “worthless,” joins fellow Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban in changing his tune on bitcoin and crypto this past year.
In August, Cuban warned shutting off the bitcoin and crypto “growth engine” would be like “stopping e-commerce in 1995” after U.S. lawmakers proposed a crypto tax provision in its $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
