Billionaire Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban says he’s still bullish on crypto despite the ongoing bear market.
In a new interview with Forbes, Cuban compares the crypto sector to the early days of streaming in the 1990s, when the now-common technology was hard to use and ignored by mainstream consumers.
The entrepreneur notes that it took about 20 years for mainstream consumers to view streaming as normal.
“With crypto, it’s very analogous to that. We’re in the early ‘hassle’ phases. Now the very earliest of crypto – however you want to decide the beginning, with Bitcoin or whatever – has been around 12 years. But in terms of applications with smart contracts, that’s only 2017 for the most part. And so we’re really only five years in.
So I’m still really bullish on crypto. We had some early wins, just like streaming audio with sports and news. Now with crypto you have DeFi (decentralized finance), and you have money transfer and some other applications, but you haven’t had any mainstream applications where your mom says, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get a wallet because I have to do A, B or C.’ It’s been DeFi, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and money transfer. And so it’s kind of boring right now. We’re waiting for that next round of applications, and there’s a lot of people working on them.”
Cuban notes the internet also had a lull period from 1995 until 2007, when the first iPhone was released. Then mobile applications exploded and the internet expanded to a whole bunch of new functions.
The billionaire says he’s looking to make investments in crypto projects that will take the sector mainstream.
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