Billionaire Mark Cuban Reveals Biggest Crypto Opportunities He’s Most Excited About

Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban says he has his eye on multiple opportunities that he believes could be the next big thing for the crypto industry.

In a new interview with Forbes, Cuban says that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) present a huge opportunity in the book industry.

“NFTs as books, I think particularly for textbooks. Now, whether or not we can get the college textbook publishers to go along is another issue but the idea of kids buying books for classes… The whole process of buying books.

First, do you want new or used? Then, you lug these books back, then at the end of the semester – because they’re only good for the time you’re in the class – you make the decision, ‘Yeah I’m going to sell it. How do I sell it?  Do I ship it off? Do I take it to the bookstore?’ It’s just a pain in the ass and in a digital world, it’s ridiculous. 

With those as NFTs, well the NFTs allow you to apply royalties so that when that book is resold, the author and the publisher and whoever else is involved can get a set royalty fee. That means that the publishers who created the book can keep on getting paid, whereas when there’s a physical book that’s sold and resold they have to hope that book falls apart, so that they can sell a new one. So I think that’s a great application.”

The billionaire says that the insurance industry could also benefit from a crypto-oriented platform. According to Cuban, health insurance could be a lot more efficient and honest if it operates in a decentralized blockchain environment that uses two entities for checks and balances.

“I think insurance, being able to very easily buy insurance… In terms of the home run type applications, in more complicated longer-to-develop type things, I think things like health insurance. The whole process of getting a claim pre-approved or approved after the fact is horrible. Nobody likes dealing with their health insurance company. First of all, for pre-approval, you never know whether you’ll get pre-approved or not…

Here, it’s like, ‘All right, I have this need. The doctor is prescribing it for me, but I can’t afford to pay it out of pocket, so what am I going to do if my insurance company doesn’t approve it?’

Well, with crypto, you could reinvent how insurance claims are pre-approved or approved by creating an environment where you have a thousand validators. There’s different types of optimistic rollups where you have validators and challengers.

So you can train people to be a validator, and pay them everytime they validate, approve or don’t approve a claim. The optimistic rollup side of it, the challengers will say ‘You didn’t approve this but not for the right reason. Your training says you should have approved it. I’m challenging it so anything you’re staking that you put up to get paid for that, I get.’

That keeps it honest. That’s just a crypto way of keeping things honest. So that type of application has scale, it has impact and it’s better in a decentralized, wide and flat organization than a vertically integrated company.”

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