Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, thinks cryptocurrency is on the same downward trend as technology and internet companies in the early 2000s.
Bitcoin prices hovered around $24,000 in Junethe lowest level since the end of 2020, and the sale of non-fungible tokens, also called NFTsplummeted between January and March 2022.
Also see: Mark Cuban on board with Biden’s plan to forgive $10,000 in student loans: ‘It needs to be fixed’
Cuban addressed the malaise in a viral Twitter
TWTR
thread on May 9, and crypto prices have continued to fall since then. “Crypto is going through the silence that the internet has been going through,” he wrote.
The comparison between cryptocurrency and the early days of the internet has been made before by Cuban and others, including entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. The dotcom bubble burst in 2000 after several Internet-centric companies received high levels of investment speculation, eventually bottoming out.
Cuban sold his company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999, just before the dotcom crisis. Broadcast.com has since been discontinued.
Also see: 1 in 3 Americans making $250,000 or more say they live paycheck to paycheck – is that really true?
Billionaire owner Dallas Mavericks is heavily invested and interested in the crypto and NFT space. He claims to own several thousand dollars worth of bitcoin
BTCUSD†
ethereal
ETHUSD
and dogecoin
DOGEUSD†
according to an CNBC report, and also says that 80% of his investments that are not on “Shark Tank” are crypto related.
But what now? While NFTs have become extremely popular in recent years, creators like beeple and NBA top shot selling NFTs for millions of dollars, recent NFT sales have plummeted as more creators flooded the market. The average daily transaction volume on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, was down more than 55% from January 2022 to March 2022according to the cryptodata tracking platform Dune Analytics.
“I think you saw a lot of newcomers at the beginning who were excited about this, but didn’t necessarily understand the basics, and I think the cooling is a reflection of that,” Jordan Birnholtz, co-founder of NFT marketplace Neon, told Distributed Ledger†
To see: How a Millionaire Outdone a Billionaire to Buy the Golden State Warriors in 2010
Millionaire Vaynerchuk, who early invested in companies like Facebook
FB†
Twitter, Uber
UBER†
snap
SNAP
and Venmo, told MarketWatch in July 2021 that like Cuban, he sees NFTs and crypto following similar paths as the early Internet companies in the late 1990s.
†I view NFTs exactly as I saw the internet in 1999† Internet stocks and their valuations went through the roof prematurely, and many things collapsed. Meanwhile, eBay
eBay†
google
GOOG
and Amazon
AMZN
were all there,” said Vaynerchuk.
Cuban said something similar in a now-deleted tweet last January. “If you look at crypto trading, it’s EXACTLY like the internet bubble. EXACTLY,” he wrote. “I think BTC, ETH and a few others will be analogous to the ones that were built during the dotcom era, survived the bubble burst and thrived, like AMZN, eBay, and Priceline. Many won’t.”
Cuban’s latest crypto comments come as prices plummet for many cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ether Prices Floating Around about half of their November peaks in June.
Also see: Who is the richest person in the world? Jeff Bezos no longer owns the top spot.
On May 9, the same day Cubans tweet, shares of crypto exchange Coinbase global
CURRENCY
fell more than 13%, MicroStrategy
MSTR
shares fell more than 17% and Riot Blockchain Inc.
REVOLT
decreased by more than 13%.