- Billionaire investor Kevin O'Leary highlighted solana as he laid out his crypto investment strategy on a recent podcast.
- "Who's working on that? Sam Bankman Fried and his team. Why wouldn't ya bet that horse?" he said.
- The 'Shark Tank' star said crypto platforms will eventually be the 12th biggest sector in the S&P 500.
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"Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary's enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies hasn't dimmed even as prices have fallen, and he says he believes solana and polygon are going to be two of the most successful projects.
O'Leary joined crypto investor Anthony Pompliano to speak about cryptocurrencies and blockchain on the Best Business podcast earlier this week, where he made some bold calls about the future of digital tokens.
When asked how he determines which cryptocurrencies to invest in, O'Leary said his two-step process involves first looking at the engineering team behind the crypto and then what economic value the team is creating.
This brought him onto altcoins like polygon (matic) and solana, which he used as explanations to clarify his process. When it came to solana he was impressed by their innovation efforts, "they're trying to solve problems in a different way to speed everything up."
However, what really stood out to him here was the team working on solana – crypto exchange FTX, founded by 29-year old Sam Bankman-Fried.
"Who's working on that? Sam Bankman Fried and his team. Why wouldn't ya bet that horse?" O'Leary, whose nickname is "Mr Wonderful", said.
Despite the rout in the cryptocurrency market, solana's sol token is still boasting handsome gains. At around $142, it's still worth over 4,000% more than it was at this point last year, making it one of the strongest performers over the last 12 months, behind gaming platform Axie Infinity's axs token, which is up a whopping 11,500%, and polygon's matic token, which is up 7,500%.
O'Leary's approach to polygon was similar, first meeting the network's engineering team in Dubai before assessing what economic value they wanted to create.
"Aggregating transactions to reduce gas fees on eth is a smart idea," he said. Since polygon wanted to reduce the cost of using ether as a payment method and he was impressed by the team, he invested.
And O'Leary didn't stop here, in clarifying this process he explained how he has come to view cryptocurrencies and all things digital after years of investing in the technology sector.
In his mind, the best way to view all things digital is that it's all just software.
"One day, crypto and all these software platforms are going to be the 12th sector of the S&P," he said.
However, he did point out the importance of the US Federal Reserve embracing and regulating the cryptocurrency market efficiently. He said he was hopeful that Fed Chair Jerome Powell's upcoming report on central bank digital currencies will show how the central bank plans to regulate the space, it will "become the global standard."