Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has stated that minting his first NFT is what really got him hooked on crypto.
The Shark Tank star’s comments came during an appearance at the North American Bitcoin Conference earlier this week. According to Cuban, cryptocurrencies have always interested him, but NFTs are the technology that really caught his eye.
“I’d always – on the peripheral – paid attention to bitcoin, and the pricing, and the tokens and the currencies, but what really got me into it was, about a year ago when I minted my first NFT,” Cuban said to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. “What’s interesting to me is the fact that you could take a digital file – audio, video, picture, whatever – and not only mint it to sell it, but also attach royalties to it, and I’m like, ‘How can you do that?’ Because you can’t do that with anything physical.”
After Cuba’s first taste of non-fungible tokens, the billionaire started researching smart contracts and Ethereum, as well as learning about Solidity. The rabbit hole eventually led Cuban to discover the disruptive potential of blockchain and crypto as a whole.
“NFTs, while they’re hot right now and everybody is talking about them, they’re really more just a proof of concept for what you can do with smart contracts and decentralization,” concluded Cuban.
Dive deeper
While NFTs may have been the spark that ignited Cuba’s passion for blockchain technology, Cuba is now a big supporter of cryptocurrency. During an appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Problem With Jon Stewart” podcast last week, the entrepreneur revealed that the majority of his non-Shark Tank investments are now in crypto.
“The investments that I am making now are not in traditional businesses,” said Cuban. “80% of the investments I make that are non-Shark Tank are in and around cryptocurrencies.”
Cuban blockchain investments include NFT companies such as OpenSea, CryptoSlam, and SuperRare as well as scaling solutions such as Arbitrum and Polygon. The entrepreneur also has a stake in the decentralized derivatives exchange, Injective Protocol.
