Without an overhaul of crypto regulation by the U.S. Congress, Wall Street’s push to expand tokenisation and institutional investors’ inclusion of bitcoin are unlikely to gain full momentum, a view has emerged.

On May 6, blockchain media outlet CoinDesk reported that billionaire investor Kevin O'Leary (케빈 오리어리) said major financial firms and institutional investors would struggle to deploy capital in earnest into blockchain-based assets until clear federal-level rules are in place in the United States.

O'Leary, speaking at the Consensus 2026 event in Miami, said the tokenisation boom is overstated. He said major asset allocators that make institutional investment decisions still view most digital assets as off-limits. "Tokenisation will never be adopted by institutional indexers," he said, adding that "bitcoin is still a peripheral asset for big players."

He pointed to the completion of U.S. legislation as the turning point. Digital assets need to be set out in law within the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) framework and aligned with a global compliance system for the market to move, he said. "The bill has to actually pass," O'Leary said. "If that happens, everything will change."

The remarks come as Wall Street has recently expanded tokenisation experiments that convert traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and funds into blockchain-based digital tokens. Tokenisation has been discussed as a way to improve financial infrastructure by enabling 24-hour trading and shortening settlement times. O'Leary drew a line, saying that regardless of technological potential, legal certainty must come first for institutions to commit meaningful amounts of capital.

He cited stablecoins as a case where regulation increased demand. Referring to recent U.S. legislative moves, he said stablecoins were adopted almost immediately after the passage of the GENIUS Act. In cross-border remittances in particular, he said transactions became possible "in minutes instead of wasting three days, at far lower cost, with full compliance and transparency."

He also said institutional interest within the crypto market has narrowed sharply. "Ninety-seven percent of the total market value is effectively concentrated in bitcoin and ethereum," O'Leary said. By contrast, he said many small tokens have shrunk rapidly. In his view, the market is splitting between speculative assets and blockchain infrastructure that sees real corporate demand.

Over the long term, he said a bigger opportunity lies in finding a blockchain platform that major companies will adopt as a standard. If platforms used in corporate operations such as logistics, contract management and inventory systems are built, they could become barriers to entry, he said. "Adoption has to happen on the platform for a moat to form," he said.

O'Leary stressed that the future of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) should also be viewed from an infrastructure perspective. Energy and data centres could hold greater value than digital assets themselves, he said. "Power is more valuable than bitcoin," he said, adding that in future investment decisions, the infrastructure underpinning assets could become more important than the assets themselves.

His remarks show that while market expectations are rising around tokenisation and institutional inflows, large-scale adoption depends on regulatory clarity and the buildout of enterprise infrastructure. As the pace of crypto lawmaking in the U.S. Congress intersects with Wall Street’s tokenisation experiments, the market’s centre of gravity could shift from speculation in individual tokens to blockchain infrastructure that regulated capital can use.