'Shark Tank's' Kevin O'Leary signals investors should back solana, given FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried is working on the altcoin

markets.businessinsider.com:

SALT NY

«Shark Tank» star Kevin O'Leary's enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies hasn't dimmed even as prices have fallen, and he says he believes solana and polygon are going to be two of the most successful projects.

O'Leary joined crypto investor Anthony Pompliano to speak about cryptocurrencies and blockchain on the Best Business podcast earlier this week, where he made some bold calls about the future of digital tokens.

When asked how he determines which cryptocurrencies to invest in, O'Leary said his two-step process involves first looking at the engineering team behind the crypto and then what economic value the team is creating. 

This brought him onto altcoins like polygon (matic) and solana, which he used as explanations to clarify his process. When it came to solana he was impressed by their innovation efforts, «they're trying to solve problems in a different way to speed everything up.» 

However, what really stood out to him here was the team working on solana — crypto exchange FTX, founded by 29-year old Sam Bankman-Fried. 

«Who's working on that? Sam Bankman Fried and his team. Why wouldn't ya bet that horse?» O'Leary, whose nickname is «Mr Wonderful», said.

Despite the rout in the cryptocurrency market, solana's sol token is still boasting handsome gains. At around $142, it's still worth over 4,000% more than it was at this point last year, making it one of the strongest performers over the last 12 months, behind gaming platform Axie Infinity's axs token, which is up a whopping 11,500%, and polygon's matic token, which is up 7,500%.

O'Leary's approach to polygon was similar, first meeting the network's engineering team in Dubai before assessing what economic value they wanted to create.

«Aggregating transactions to reduce