Shark Tank Star Kevin O’Leary Says This Nascent Sector of the Crypto Market Could Outshine Bitcoin

Billionaire and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary says an emerging region of the crypto industry has the potential to surpass Bitcoin (BTC).

In a new interview with CNBC, the business magnate says that he believes non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could eventually outshine BTC due to their real-world use cases.

“You’re going to see a lot of movement in terms of doing authentication and insurance policies and real estate transfer taxes all online over the next few years, making NFTs a much bigger, more fluid market potentially than just Bitcoin alone.”

NFTs are unique virtual tokens that authenticate ownership of certain digital assets, such as sports memorabilia and art. However, new NFT marketplaces such as 4K are attempting to tokenize ownership of real-life physical assets, something O’Leary says is key to the industry’s growth.

In an interview with Forbes, O’Leary says he’s invested in an NFT project working to tokenize white papers for the watch industry.

“[NFTs] offer so much value around authentication, inventory management, and all kinds of use cases in different asset classes.

I prefer NFTs tied to hard assets, physical assets; the one that I’m working on developing a white paper for is the watch industry.

I’ve invested in that because we have so much fraud in watch collecting, which we can eliminate by using some very high-resolution scanning of dials linked to NFTs.”

According to data from the NFT resource website nonfungible.com, NFTs have thus far seen just over $16 billion in sales since 2017. However, the overwhelming majority of them came in mid-2021, when the sector experienced a massive boom.

BTC is exchanging hands at $43,019 at time of writing, an 11% decrease from its seven-day peak of $48,454.

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Featured Image: Shutterstock/Tithi Luadthong/Natalia Siiatovskaia