Billionaire Carl Icahn Plans His Crypto Market Entry In A ‘Big Way’, Pledges Over $1 Billion Investment

Despite this recent market correction, investors worldwide are seeing cryptocurrencies as a big ticket to wealth creation in the future. American businessman and billionaire Carl Icahn recently said that he is planning to get into the crypto markets in a “big way” with an investment planning of $1 billion and upwards.

During his Bloomberg TV interview, Icahn said that he hasn’t bought any cryptocurrencies yet but is rather some of the biggest market players like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and the crypto sector as a whole to determine the underlying opportunities.

Icahn points out that cryptocurrencies have been gaining a lot more prominence as an alternative investments due to the fears of rising inflation in the economy. Besides, he also added that it’s a “little wrong-headed” to criticize cryptocurrencies saying they don’t have any underlying value.

“Well, what’s the value of a dollar? The only value of the dollar is because you can use it to pay taxes,” he said. “I’m looking at the whole business, and how I might get involved in it.”

The billionaire investor also thinks that people are looking into alternative currencies since the equity markets are trading at “ridiculous prices”. “I don’t think Reddit and Robinhood and those guys are necessarily bad, I think they do serve a purpose,” Icahn said. “Money is funneling back into companies. Some of these companies might be OK, but a number of them, the risk-reward is absurd.”

Interestingly, the billionaire also had some words of praise for the world’s second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH). Icahn believes that ETH can function both as a store of value as well as a payments system.

Speaking his views on Ethereum and Bitcoin, the American billionaire said: “With Ethereum, it's the underlying blockchain. So, Ethereum has two things — you can use it as a payment system, you can use it as a store of value. So Ethereum and Bitcoin are different. Bitcoin to me is just a store of value”.

Ray Dalio, founder of asset management giant Bridgewater Associates recently admitted owning some Bitcoin’s while speaking at the 2021 CoinDesk Consensus Conference. Dalio said that he would rather prefer having Bitcoin over bonds.

“The more we create savings in [bitcoin], the more you might say, ‘I’d rather have bitcoin than the bond.’ Personally, I’d rather have bitcoin than a bond. And then the more that happens, then it goes into bitcoin and it doesn’t go into credit, then [governments] lose control of that,” he said. 

However, Dalio still feels that Bitcoin could be at the risk of higher government regulation with the possibility of being outlawed.