The entrepreneur is bullish on crypto, but prefers the established names like bitcoin and ether
Entrepreneur and TV personality Kevin O’Leary, seen earlier this month at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., is no fan of altcoins.
When it comes to that vast category of cryptocurrencies known as altcoins, “Mr. Wonderful” is feeling less than wonderful.
Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian-born entrepreneur of “Shark Tank” fame, has derided altcoins as “poo-poo coins” in recent interviews – and he doubled down on those comments when speaking with MarketWatch this week.
Altcoins generally refer to any cryptocurrency that isn’t bitcoin (BTCUSD); as the name implies, they’re alternatives to the world’s largest crypto token. O’Leary, among some others, also considers ether (ETHUSD), which is the second-largest crypto by market capitalization, to be exempt from the altcoin realm.
The overall altcoin market saw sharp declines in the fourth quarter of 2025, as did bitcoin and ether, owing to a variety of factors. But there’s a broader picture as well: Data from crypto research firm CryptoQuant shows the market cap of altcoins at the start of 2024 to have been about on par with bitcoin at the time – roughly $830 billion. But now, bitcoin has a market cap of about $1.8 trillion, or around $600 billion higher than the market cap of all altcoins combined, according to CryptoQuant data.
To that end, O’Leary’s main point is that if you want to be investing in crypto – and he indeed holds positions himself – you can best achieve that by simply investing in bitcoin and ether, since the two tokens represent the lion’s share of the crypto market and have an established place. (Ether has a current market cap of around $360 billion, according to CryptoQuant.)
The rest are, well, “poo-poo coins,” in O’Leary’s view. He says he sold his positions in more than two dozen altcoins back in October.
O’Leary insists he’s not trying to be insulting, but says he’s just taking a realistic view of how to put your money in crypto and reap any potential gains. “I’m not emotionally involved with one coin or another,” O’Leary told MarketWatch. “I simply look at data. I’m an indexer.”
Doubling down on his view about why it only makes sense to focus on the two big crypto names because of their market dominance, O’Leary said: “Don’t shoot the messenger; shoot the numbers. It’s all poo-poo.”
‘Don’t shoot the messenger; shoot the numbers. It’s all poo-poo.’Kevin O’Leary, entrepreneur and TV personality
Moreover, O’Leary doesn’t see a rosy future for altcoins. As he told CoinDesk earlier this month: “All the poo-poo coins are still stuck down anywhere from 60% to 90% and they’re never coming back.”
Naturally, plenty of crypto experts disagree with O’Leary when it comes to altcoins.
“I don’t think they’re poo-poo coins,” said Chris Kline, chief operating officer and co-founder of BitcoinIRA.
Kline argues that O’Leary’s take on the altcoin market is too simplistic, saying that while some altcoins are indeed “lower quality,” others hold true promise in terms of their utility value – meaning in their use for different types of financial transactions.
In that regard, Kline points to some prominent “high-quality” altcoins – notably, solana (SOLUSD), XRP (XRPUSD) and chainlink (LINKUSD).
But O’Leary still isn’t convinced. He says altcoins don’t have the necessary recognition, and that it will takes lots of promotional effort to get them there, if at all. “They have to have tens of millions of dollars in marketing,” he told Fox Business.
Porter Stowell, chief executive of W3.io, a Web3 innovation platform, doesn’t entirely disagree with O’Leary’s perspective on altcoins – at least as it applies to mainstream investors. Altcoins represent a risk that might be too big for many to take, even if there may be some tokens that prove worthy over time, he notes.
“Unless you do your research, it’s a dangerous game you’re playing in the altcoin market,” Stowell said.
Meanwhile, O’Leary’s investments in crypto go beyond the coins themselves. He’s also focusing on acquiring land where crypto-mining centers could eventually go, since he sees that as critical to the industry’s future.
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