Kevin O'Leary Sticks a $1 Million Price on Bitcoin—With One Condition

Kevin O'Leary believes Bitcoin will reach $1 million—one day. The catch, as he sees it, is quantum computing. Until the industry proves that sufficiently powerful quantum machines cannot break the cryptography securing the Bitcoin network, big investors will keep their allocations small, he argued.

O'Leary, the investor and television personality, laid out the position in an interview with The Rollup at Avalanche Summit in New York, according to Decrypt. No quantum computer capable of breaking Bitcoin's elliptic-curve signatures exists today; forecasts for when one might appear stretch from the early 2030s to never. But the worry—dubbed "Q-Day" in industry circles—already influences how funds behave, and O'Leary has said elsewhere that it explains why major funds cap Bitcoin at roughly 3% of a portfolio. A Google research paper published earlier this year argued the threat could materialize sooner than many expect.

From a diamond-studded baseball card to tokenized shares

The quantum warning was one thread in a wide-ranging conversation. O'Leary arrived at the summit wearing a Shohei Ohtani baseball card his collecting group bought for a record sum this year—a one-of-one piece valued at $11 million, sealed in a Tiffany case containing 110 carats of diamonds and 2.2 pounds of white gold. He held it up as an argument for putting real-world assets on public blockchains.

"This asset class should be on-chain," he said, per Decrypt. "And it is on a chain right now. But it should be on blockchain."

His remarks landed in the same week the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission introduced its "Innovation Exemption," a rule permitting approved platforms to trade tokenized stocks—blockchain-based tokens representing shares of public companies. O'Leary predicted crypto and digitization would become the 12th sector of the S&P 500, "because it services all 11 other sectors." His own crypto allocation has peaked at 23% over the past seven years, against a personal cap of 5% per stock and 20% per sector.

The investor also abandoned a long-standing bet. Eighteen months ago his thesis held that owning Bitcoin and Ethereum captured 97% of the industry's volatility, on the assumption developers would converge on Ethereum. He no longer expects that: "I don't think it's going to be Ethereum anymore. I don't think it's fast enough. I don't think it's secure enough." His revised view is that entire industries will each standardize on their own chain—sports memorabilia on one network, stock exchanges on another—and the token of whichever chain the first major exchange chooses for tokenization will surge.

On AI, O'Leary said he is deliberately not picking winning models after the Ethereum lesson. Instead he owns the infrastructure: BitZero, a Nasdaq-listed company that pivoted from Bitcoin mining to power development with land, fiber and permits in Norway and Finland, alongside private projects in Alberta and Utah. He has also taken his first-ever position in uranium, betting that small modular reactors—compact nuclear units destined for U.S. data centers—will need the fuel regardless of which AI companies win. "You can't do AI without power," he said. "You might as well buy the picks and shovels of that strategy." He rejected fears of an AI slowdown, saying, "I'm in the cure cancer camp."

One regulatory note closed out the interview. O'Leary does not expect the Clarity Act—legislation meant to resolve which U.S. agency oversees crypto trading—to advance before the midterms, arguing Congress will avoid handing the current administration a partisan victory. A bipartisan version, he predicted, returns after the vote.