How Minting an NFT Hooked Mark Cuban on Crypto

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has stated that minting his first NFT is what really got him hooked on crypto. 

The comments from the Shark Tank star came during an appearance at The North American Bitcoin conference earlier this week. According to Cuban, cryptocurrencies have always been of interest to him, but NFTs are the tech 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.”

Following Cuban’s first taste of non-fungible tokens, the billionaire began to research smart contracts and ethereum, as well as learn 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.

Diving deeper

While NFTs may have been the spark that ignited Cuban’s passion for blockchain technology, Cuban is now a big believer in cryptocurrency. On 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 were 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’s 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.

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