Bitcoin Will Hit $1 Million, Says Kevin O’Leary—But There’s a Quantum Catch

We’re back in ultra bullish mode again, and "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary just put a number on Bitcoin’s endgame: $1 million. Then he laid out exactly what has to happen first.

Speaking with The Rollup podcast at Avalanche Summit in New York, the famed investor said Bitcoin’s path to seven figures rungs through a risk nobody’s solved yet: Quantum computers powerful enough to break the encryption behind the whole technology. Until that is resolved, he said, institutions will keep treating Bitcoin more like a novelty than a core holding.

O'Leary showed up to the summit wearing an $11 million baseball card around his neck. That's not a figure of speech.

The investor and media personality was draped in a Shohei Ohtani 1-of-1 collectible, sealed inside a Tiffany-made holder with 110 carats of diamonds and 2.2 pounds of white gold. His collecting group bought the card for a record sum this year. It also happened to be the perfect prop for the argument he spent the next few minutes making to The Rollup podcast.

"This asset class should be on-chain," O'Leary said, holding the piece up to the camera. "And it is on a chain right now. But it should be on blockchain."

He wasn't just talking about cardboard. This very same week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued its "Innovation Exemption," a new rule letting approved platforms trade tokenized stocks—digital tokens that represent shares of public companies and trade on a blockchain instead of a traditional stock exchange. To O'Leary, that news and the necklace are the same story.

"This sector, if you want to call crypto or digitization a sector, will become the 12th sector of the S&P," he said, "because it services all 11 other sectors." He has a rule that no more than 5% of his portfolio in any one stock, no more than 20% in any one sector. Crypto has run as high as 23% of his book over the past seven years.

Eighteen months ago, O'Leary's thesis was simple. Buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, and you've captured 97% of the industry's volatility, because everyone would eventually standardize on Ethereum. That didn't happen.

"People aren't happy," he said. "Who's next? What other chain is going to get adopted?" His new bet is that whole industries, not individual investors, will each pick their own blockchain, the way sports memorabilia might settle on Avalanche while stock exchanges land somewhere else entirely.

"I don't think it's going to be Ethereum anymore," he said. "I don't think it's fast enough. I don't think it's secure enough. That's an opinion, my own opinion."

BitcoinBTC · USD

$80,960+5.07%

Sep 11Sep 13Sep 15Sep 17Sep 18

$81.0k$79.2k$77.3k$75.5k

24h HighHigh$81,213

24h LowLow$76,205

VolVol$1.7B

Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

Today$80,000 to $82,000$80k–$82k74% chanceThis week$80,000 to $82,000$80k–$82k74% chance

Price data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →

His logic seems to be that whichever blockchain the first major exchange adopts for tokenization will see that token's value "go through the roof," because it becomes the plumbing every trade runs through afterward. Everyone else loses out.

Betting on the grid, not the models

O'Leary's other big theme is AI, and he says he's avoiding the mistake he made with Ethereum by not guessing the winner. Instead of betting on individual models, he's investing in the power grid underneath them.

"You can't do AI without power," he said. His holdings include BitZero, a former Bitcoin miner turned Nasdaq-listed power company with land, fiber and permits in Norway and Finland, plus private power projects in Alberta and Utah. For the first time in his investing career, he's also long uranium, the actual commodity.

The “Shark Tank” star explains that small modular reactors—compact nuclear plants that can be built faster and smaller than a traditional power station—are headed for U.S. data centers, and none of them run without uranium fuel. "You might as well buy the picks and shovels of that strategy," he said.

He also seems to be an e/acc himself. "There's no way there's going to be an AI slowdown," he said. "You let the Chinese beat everybody? Are you kidding? It's never going to happen." Asked to pick a side between AI doom and AI utopia, he didn't hesitate. "I'm in the cure cancer camp," he said.

Bitcoin's Quantum Catch

Then came the trillion-dollar question: Will Bitcoin ever hit $1 million? And yeah, he’s pretty bullish.

"It will," O'Leary said, "if it can resolve the doubt creeping in around quantum computing, you know, breaking the algorithms and the chain and the encryption"—the theoretical risk that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could one day forge the digital signatures that secure every Bitcoin wallet, a moment the industry has nicknamed "Q-Day."

"Some people are putting on a counter bet by investing in some of these nascent companies that are developing quantum computing software. It's a security play and that's also on the chain."

No quantum computer capable of that attack exists today, and estimates for when one might range from the early 2030s to never.

But the fear is already shaping how institutions invest: O'Leary has said elsewhere that it's why big funds cap Bitcoin exposure around 3% of a portfolio, treating it more like a sliver of gold than a core holding, a timeline a Google research paper earlier this year argued could arrive sooner than the industry expects.

On regulation, O'Leary doesn't expect the Clarity Act—the bill meant to settle which U.S. agency actually oversees crypto trading—to move before the midterm elections. He thinks Congress won't hand the current administration a partisan win on the issue now, but that a bipartisan version gets revisited once the midterms are behind them.