Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has in recent times become a crypto advocate. But for a long time, he was reluctant to deep both feet in.
Speaking to Miami mayor Francis Suarez at The ‘North American Bitcoin Conference’ on Monday, Cuban revealed what finally made him get on board.
Despite Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being around for about a decade, it was the relatively new NFTs that made the Shark Tank investor come around.
“I always paid attention to bitcoin, the pricing, the tokens and the [crypto]currencies. But what really got me into it was, about a year ago, when I minted my first NFT.” he was quoted by CNBC.
Minting an NFT is basically the process of converting an asset into a token that is represented on the blockchain.
Royalties from secondary sales provided by NFTs was a big draw to Cuban.
“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,” the Dallas Mavericks owner said.
He dug deeper into smart contracts and found the technology ‘very disruptive’.
“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,” Cuban said.
Like his fellow Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, Cuban now considers himself a ‘Crypto Evangelist’.
