Kevin O'Leary says he has resumed buying cryptocurrency for the next market cycle, though he has not disclosed which assets are among his new positions.
“I'm back in the saddle buying new positions, putting my bets on for this next cycle,” the O'Leary Ventures chairman told The Block at Avalanche Summit New York. His bet is less about calling the next hot token than identifying which blockchain can become infrastructure for a major industry.
The exchange decision he is watching
O'Leary said executives across different sectors are evaluating blockchains, but “none of them are saying the same thing.” He believes the first major stock exchange to adopt a chain could break that stalemate.
He called such a decision a “watershed moment,” arguing that companies and financial institutions connected to the exchange would favor technology that meets the same operational and compliance requirements. That is O'Leary's investment thesis, not a settled outcome: no single chain has yet emerged from the conversations he described.
The market is already moving toward more on-chain trading. On Sept. 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued conditional, five-year exemptions that give certain blockchain-based venues a route to trade tokenized U.S. stocks. Eligible tokens must carry the same rights as conventional shares, and issuers can opt out after receiving notice, Axios reported. The SEC action creates room for experimentation, but it does not decide which exchanges, public companies or blockchains will win adoption.
A return to buying, not an all-clear
O'Leary's comments mark a shift from the portfolio-concentration story he was telling earlier this year. In a May interview, CoinDesk said he had cut his crypto positions from 27 to three while focusing on bitcoin, ether and the hunt for a chain that could gain broad corporate use.
He remains cautious about the policy timetable. O'Leary told The Block he does not expect the Clarity Act to pass before the midterm elections, but he believes lawmakers will return to crypto market-structure rules as they develop tax policy for digital assets.
For bitcoin, he said institutional exposure could eventually reach 1% to 3% of alternative-asset allocations, using gold as a comparison. Like his exchange-adoption thesis, that range is his forecast rather than a promise about where institutional money will go.
