Kevin O'Leary explains what is holding bitcoin back from breaking out higher

The largest cryptocurrency failed to break out higher and continued to experience wild volatility because there is a lack of institutional adoption at the sovereign level, according to Kevin O'Leary, a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and star of the "Shark Tank" series. "The reason bitcoin stays in a very tight trading range is basically nobody owns it," he told Insider in an interview at the Crypto Bahamas conference. "I don't mean that facetiously. I mean it's owned by retail investors, high-net-worth investors, some hedge funds, and some specialty funds, but no sovereign wealth funds have indexed it."The lack of crypto adoption by these state-owned investment funds means that there is no buyer supporting the market when cryptocurrencies go down. But that could change even with a small sovereign mandate of 1%, which is kept at that weighting in perpetuity once it's indexed, he explained. "If you have a 1% weighting and the price drops, you buy more to get back up to 1%," he said. "If it goes higher, you sell down to 1%. That provides stability in the market, but we don't have that."