Kevin O'Leary: Immutable Holdings will be at the cutting edge of the entire NFT industry

Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank Investor & O’Shares ETFs Chairman and Jordan Fried, CEO of Immutable Holdings, join Yahoo Finance to discuss Immutable Holdings, Inc. going public on the NEO stock exchange and the future of the NFT space.

Video transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Well, starting today, you have another option when it comes to investing in blockchain. Immutable Holdings is making its market debut on Canada's NEO Exchange and the stock doing quite nicely, up better than 60%. It also won the backing of Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary.

And joining me now is the CEO of Immutable Holdings, Jordan Fried, along with Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O'Leary. Welcome, gentlemen. Great to have you here. I know you both had a busy day. You rang the opening bell at the NEO Exchange this morning. Jordan, I'm going to start with you because you're calling your company the Berkshire of blockchain. How so?

JORDAN FRIED: Great question. Well, up until this point in time, Alexis, there hasn't been a really great way to take exposure to the entire blockchain industry beyond buying maybe some of the Bitcoin mining companies that are public and recently, companies like Coinbase, which have now come to public equity markets. We're the first true blockchain portfolio holding company with breakout brands, like NFT.com, 1-800 Bitcoin, and others, that has come to public markets. So we're really excited about bringing that opportunity to traditional investors.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And democratizing data, which is something I know, Kevin, you and I have talked a lot about over the past few months. You know, you were a self-described crypto convert. Tell me why the change of heart and why Immutable Holdings in particular.

KEVIN O'LEARY: Well, I've been raising my position in the whole crypto infrastructure space from 3%. By year end, it's going to be at 7% of the portfolio and the operating company. And I'm looking for investments, not just coins and tokens and level one, level two chains. I want to own the baseline infrastructure of crypto. And that's really blockchain.

And what I found about Jordan's company is it had a lot of diversification in it. And I like that. There's no question about it. Just the NFT.com domain is extremely valuable because NFTs are going to be issued for all kinds of different asset classes. And I think this company is going to be at the cutting edge of the entire NFT industry. And that's basically the reason to take this position.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Well, Jordan, way to go to get the NFT.com name trademarked early on. That was smart thinking. But, you know, this is a very crowded space. And NFTs, as we know, have been used as a store of value through things like digital art. But you see more. What is the future and the longevity of NFTs?

JORDAN FRIED: It's a great question. Whether we like it or not, NFTs are going to be part of our lives for the rest of our lives. So today, we've seen the NFT marketplace really manifest in the form of these digital JPEGs or GIFs that people are buying, trading, and speculating on. And some of it's cuckoo bananas. You've got people out there buying JPEGs for $5, $6 $7 million. We had Christie's set records in the tens of millions of dollars for literally digital pieces of art.

We believe NFTs can be so much more. Quite literally everything we own in the physical world will be represented in the digital world in the form of a token, whether that's a title deed to a property, an authenticity certificate of a watch that Mr. Wonderful wears, like an FP Journe or a Rolex, or whether that's seat 5 and 6, section 101, row 7, at Madison Square Garden. All of this is going to be tokenized. And this will bring better liquidity to traditionally illiquid assets.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: So Kevin, break this down for me in terms of headwinds for the NFT market because I think about authenticity being a huge component here because I want to make sure that what I'm buying, this digital asset, is the real deal. And maybe it is just one of 10 or one of one. Is that one of the biggest concerns or the biggest headwinds you think to the NFT market?

KEVIN O'LEARY: Well, one of the reasons I invested in Jordan's company-- and I love the ticker, HOLD, H-O-L-D. As I like to say, probably a good idea to hold some HOLD. But there's a use case I want to describe to you that I think will resonate. I'm a huge watch collector. I collect it like art. As an asset class, I have a large amount of capital tied up in watches.

So let's say, for example, I am trying to buy a very specific Patek Philippe world timer that it stopped being made 27 years ago. Now I found this watch. It's sitting in Asia. And I can't buy it because I don't know if it's real. I need to send it to John Riordan or one of the other authenticators that are well known in the world of Patek Philippe. These watches are extremely expensive, between a quarter of a million and half a million dollars. And I need to know with certainty that it's real.

If it had an NFT that could authenticate it, that I could look at immediately to know the provenance of the watch, who owned it, when it was last serviced, what the serial number is, what the complications look like, what the dial is like, the key to this whole industry is the World Horological Society is going to set the standards. And then every watch manufacturer is going to want to have this NFT. And I certainly as a collector want to have it for all of my pieces.

And who sits in the middle of that? Immutable Holdings. They have NFT.com. I want it to be curated. I want it to be authenticated. I want to have access to these NFTs. And I want them organized on a platform. And I think probably-- you don't know with certainty-- there's always risk in investing. But I can't find a company in a better position to do that than Immutable Holdings with NFT.com.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And you did it in your home in your home country of Canada, too, Kevin. I love it. Listen, since I have you here, I have to ask you about what's going on in the market today. A big sell-off, largest one-day drop since May. On a day like this, what do you do with your portfolio? Are you a buyer? And if so, what are you buying?

KEVIN O'LEARY: You know, I love-- you know, volatility, I don't love it. But when it does happen, it lets me readjust. So, you know, we have gone through these corrections, particularly in technology, now for about two years. And everybody says, oh, tech is over. The Fed is going to stop their easing program. And they're going to reverse their position. It's the end of technology. It couldn't be farther than the truth.

The productivity enhancement that is occurring in technology is the reason that we have such a buoyant economy now. And so I always look at this as a buying opportunity for the names I already own. And I'm a big user of indexes. So for me, that means adding more to my technology portfolio, my enterprise portfolio in digitization, in retail, and all of that.

And, you know, and again, you have a company like Immutable Holdings coming public on a corrective day like this that's up 40%, 50%, 60% in the first few hours of trading because people recognize this is the future. And you want to have exposure to companies like this. And when you have a corrective day like this, there's no reason not to take advantage of it. People always are balanced between the fear of volatility.

I've been living through it a long time. I don't sell my stocks when there's volatility. I try and find opportunity in it. And I'm not sure we're going to-- we're going to get into a very volatile period in the back end of the year, as the Fed decides what direction it's going to go and these packages, the government, and financing debt, and all of this stuff. But it's all noise. At the end of the day, the economy is very healthy.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, you heard it here first. Kevin O'Leary, John Fried, thanks so much. Again, the company is Immutable Holdings. Congratulations on a great Wall Street debut. Stock up about 60% right now on the NEO Exchange.