Mark Cuban Says Crypto-Based DeFi Movement Reminds Him of Early Days of the Internet

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban says the crypto-based world of decentralized finance (DeFi) reminds him of the internet boom in the mid-90s.

In a new interview on The Defiant podcast, the Shark Tank star notes that the internet had been around for years before people started to accept it as a useful technology.

“For me, DeFi really was – now blockchain, in particular – is really starting to mature. You’re starting to see applications that are really coming into play. You’re starting to see NFT (non-fungible tokens), and it’s not so much about just about how much is sold, market value, but more just that people are becoming more comfortable with it and so we’re starting to see these applications that are just popping up left and right. And it reminded me so much of the early days of the internet where in the mid-90s, people started talking about internet applications but the internet had been around for ten years. It was mostly in universities and so it was very analogous to what’s going on with blockchain.”

Also reminding Cuban of the internet’s early days is Ethereum and smart contracts. Though he sees ETH’s gas fees as an issue, Cuban still believes that smart contracts in general are the beginning of something special.

“The biggest limitation right now is transaction costs, right. They’re ridiculous. You can’t do anything. And because of that, it actually puts a lid on the number of actual transactions and you see people being pushed to private blockchains like Top Shots and different NFTs and different tokens and stuff like that…

Smart contracts are real, and smart contracts and blockchain remind me of the early days of the internet when people realized that there is a network effect and that with just HTML and then some basic javascript you can do a whole lot of business and create a whole lot of new businesses.”

When it comes to Bitcoin, the Dallas Mavericks owner isn’t yet convinced that it can be relied on as an effective hedge against inflation.

“It’s not that it definitely won’t happen but you can’t really value that right now to say without question Bitcoin acts as an alternative or as a hedge to fiat because there’s no evidence. That’s a hope that it will just like for gold bugs it will, and in Argentina… back when their currency collapsed, gold itself was useless but people ended up using commodities and food and even gold jewelry became kind of a trading point… There are people who will tell you ‘Gold is the fallback currency and has been for thousands of years!’ It’s just a narrative.”

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