Mark Cuban Divulges How Much Of His Investments Are Crypto-Related; Reveals Moment That ‘Really Got Me’ Into Crypto

Written by Paul Sacca on January 31, 2022 updated October 22, 2024

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has been one of the most prominent supporters of cryptocurrency. However, there was one defining moment that really sold the billionaire on the possibilities of crypto.

“I always paid attention to bitcoin, the pricing, the tokens and the [crypto]currencies,” Cuban said at The North American Bitcoin Conference earlier this month, according to CNBC. “But what really got me into it was, about a year ago, when I minted my first NFT.”

An NFT or a non-fungible token is an asset that is “tokenized” into a digital unit with a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. NFTs are part of the blockchain.

“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, I’m like, ‘How can you do that?’ Because you can’t do that with anything physical,” Cuban noted.

The Shark Tank investor then talked about smart contracts.

Coinbase describes a smart contract as:

A smart contract, like any contract, establishes the terms of an agreement. But unlike a traditional contract, a smart contract’s terms are executed as code running on a blockchain like Ethereum. Smart contracts allow developers to build apps that take advantage of blockchain security, reliability, and accessibility while offering sophisticated peer-to-peer functionality — everything from loans and insurance to logistics and gaming.

Cuban added, “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.”

You can watch Cuban’s entire talk at the 2022 North American Bitcoin Conference below.

Mark Cuban – who has a net worth of $4.5 billion, according to Forbes – recently revealed how much of his investments are crypto-related.

This month the Dallas Mavericks owner revealed that he is investing heavily into crypto-related opportunities.

“The investments I’m making now are not in traditional businesses,” Cuban said on a recent episode of “The Problem With Jon Stewart” podcast. “80% of the investments that I make that are not on Shark Tank are in or around cryptocurrencies.”

Cuban is especially interested in decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs.

“That is really where I look to invest,” he said. “All these new businesses are being formulated now that take this new approach.”

Investopedia explains:

One of the major features of digital currencies is that they are decentralized. This means they are not controlled by a single institution like a government or central bank, but instead are divided among a variety of computers, networks, and nodes. In many cases, virtual currencies make use of this decentralized status to attain levels of privacy and security that are typically unavailable to standard currencies and their transactions.

Cuban told Stewart that the cryptocurrency space is “like the early days of the internet,” adding, “The exact same thing is happening now. It’s 1995 for cryptocurrencies.”

“It’s not to say there aren’t a lot of problems,” Cuban cautioned.

He noted that cryptocurrency “is hard to understand and it’s a hassle.”

“But 10 years from now, there’s going to be those that succeed that will create its own economy,” Cuban concluded.

In January 2021, Cuban revealed, “I don’t think people realize I try to test and use all this stuff and have for years. I still have crypto from the early days of Coinbase. I’ve never sold anything.”