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Millionaire investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary is sharing his perspective on the future of stablecoin regulation in the US.
In an interview on Kitco News, O’Leary says that he welcomes regulation in the crypto space as it will validate the asset class and give institutional investors a clear ramp to push capital into cryptocurrencies.
“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…
I work closely with lots of pension plans and sovereign funds. They’re not touching any of this yet for one singular reason: the regulator has not ruled.”
O’Leary also pushes back on the notion that regulators could overstep and regulate stablecoins out of existence.
“They could, but I think the cat’s out of the bag. 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.’”
As for whether or not the government will fully introduce its own Fedcoin stablecoin, the millionaire investor thinks it’s unlikely and that governments will probably regulate stablecoin providers, such as Circle, more like traditional banks.
“I think you and I will still be talking about this 20 years from now, as far as the Fed doing that. I think what’s more likely to happen is they will basically regulate issuers of stablecoins as banks. And so, you look at a CIrcle, they’ll get a bank license, they’ll be regulated.
If they’re tying their stablecoin to the US dollar, then, you know, one argument from the regulator’s point of view would be, ‘Let’s treat it like a bank through all the regulatory environments that banks have to deal with, and all of the balance sheet scrutiny and everything else.’ That would be a good outcome. I’d be okay with that too.”