Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary (aka “Mr. Wonderful” on ABC TV series “Shark Tank“) recently talked about how he thinks the U.S. will regulate stablecoins in the future.
In an interview with Kitco News on October 6, O’Leary said he was open to crypto regulations and welcomed the input of government bodies to provide institutional investors with more protections. He also said regulations would validate the asset class, thereby driving more capital and confidence to the market.
As reported by The Daily Hodl, O’Leary said:
I, for one, would welcome a regulator to come in here and start to apply regulatory platforms to all of these cryptocurrencies and all of the level-1 and level-2 blockchains because you gotta understand something, people are very excited about crypto, but the truth is, the real money, the institutional money is not there yet.
O’Leary also mentioned that many of the pension plans and sovereign funds he works with have yet to touch cryptoassets for a single reason: “the regulator has not ruled.”
The Shark Tank star refuted the notion that increased regulations and government oversight would detract from the stablecoin industry:
I think the genie’s out of the bottle, and all those other ways of looking at it, because the productivity enhancement proven already in the first $30 billion, the opportunity to be leaders in this worldwide, the opportunity to enhance the productivity of our own economy and payment systems, and all of the other things that stablecoins could do are just too big an opportunity for an economy this size, and I just don’t think a regulator’s gonna say, ‘No, no, no. We don’t want any of that innovation.
O’Leary said it was unlikely that the Fed would issue its own stablecoin, telling Michelle Makori, Lead Anchor & Editor-in-Chief at Kitco News, and that this was an issue we would still be discussing “20 years from now.” He went on to say that the Fed was more interested in regulating the issuers of stablecoins as banks rather than producing their own federal stablecoin.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
