Billionaire investor and former FTX investor Kevin O’Leary said that all unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges will go “to zero” and disappear to make way for “a regulated crypto market”.
Interview with Kevin O’Leary
In an interview with Kitco News, he mentioned that in his last hearing with the US Senate, he felt that congressmen are “frustrated” with the bitcoin and digital currency ecosystem.
“They’re tired of holding these hearings every six months, every time one of these cryptocurrency companies blows up and goes to zero,” he mentioned.
The investor predicted that unregulated exchanges “will go to zero” and that eventually, a regulated crypto market will emerge that “I think will be very interesting because it has real merit”.
O’Leary said bitcoin and cryptocurrencies themselves are not bad, because they are just “software code”.
Instead, he said that the negative in the ecosystem “is all these rogue players and these unregulated exchanges and the issuance of all these meritless tokens, the tokens on the exchanges. All that crap… It’s all going to go away.”
The entrepreneur, an advocate of the collapsed FTX, revealed that he has a particular problem with exchanges issuing their own tokens and pointed out that this practice is shrouded in a lack of transparency.
“We don’t even have to mention which exchange, but all the big unregulated global exchanges incentivize account holders and users to buy their tokens to get discounts on trading fees. It’s not new, it’s been going on for years. And then they put them on their balance sheet at a ridiculous valuation,” he said.
He denounced that, if you look up the owners of these tokens, you can see that 97% of the cryptocurrencies are owned by the issuer, “and you don’t know who that person is because it’s just a nameless wallet”.
O’Leary stressed that the other 3% of exchange token owners are the ones who are valuing the asset at “$60, $70, $80, $80, $90, $100 billion”.
“If there’s a run on cash, a return of the asset to fiat, back to US dollars at $100 billion, you know the exchange is going to fail, and that’s exactly what happened to FTX…” he said.
On 14 February, O’Leary testified during a US Senate hearing on the collapse of the FTX exchange.
During his testimony, he accused Binance of “intentionally” sabotaging FTX, with the intention of becoming an “unregulated global monopoly”.
However, he did not mention the fraudulent business practices and misuse of billions of dollars in customer funds that led to former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried facing eight federal criminal charges.
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