Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is in a friendly battle with legacy finance executive Peter Mallouk over the viability of crypto assets.
Mallouk, a certified financial planner and the president of wealth management firm Creative Planning, questioned Cuban on Twitter for saying there is a chance Dogecoin (DOGE) goes up in value over the longterm.
Cuban quickly fired back, however, telling Mallouk, a longtime crypto bear, that many crypto projects will succeed due to their technological innovation.
Explains the Dallas Mavericks owner,
“Let me help you. Layer 1 and Layer 2 based chains are deterministic, programmable platforms that can be used to create applications that can increase productivity. Their ‘coins’ provide the ability for coin owners to benefit from the value created. Not all will succeed, but many will…
If you look at crypto assets whether ETH, DOGE, BTC, MKR (Maker), etc. and only see something intangible for people to trade, you haven’t really looked. If you see smart contracts and programming languages and think of new ways to disrupt industries then I’m saying there’s a chance.”
Cuban goes on to note that the speculative nature of crypto doesn’t diminish its potential to usher in a new era of financial technology.
“Look at all the financial interactions you have in your life for banking, insurance, buying and selling where you have to trust faceless, nameless people working for a company whose decisions can change your life. Would you prefer to continue to trust them?
Or would you prefer to work with a deterministic, distributed system that is not built on trusting those companies but rather built on a transparent set of rules that are out in the open for anyone to see? These are the reasons crypto has taken off.
Yes, there is massive speculation. Just as there has been at the inflection point of every new technology. And every single one of the technologies has been dismissed by legacy institutions. Until they weren’t.”
Cuban and Mallouk are also going back and forth on a potential long-term crypto vs. equities bet, but at time of writing it’s unclear whether the wager became a reality.
Earlier this week, Cuban defended DOGE against the claim that it does not have significant utility, noting that it is the cenral crypto asset that people have been using for transactions at the Mavericks, but that its central roadblock in its path towards further adoption is that Robinhood users cannot directly spend the DOGE that they’ve bought on the app.
“Because Doge is the one coin that people actually use for transactions. We take many others via BitPay. But people spend their Doge and that means more businesses will start taking it. The greatest inhibitor to its growth is that you can’t spend the Doge you buy on Robinhood.”
Don't Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inboxFeatured Image: Shutterstock/AleksandrMorrisovich