Mark Cuban, the American billionaire entrepreneur that you would know from Shark Tank, is an investor who has a current net worth of an estimated 4.3 billion USD. Also, he comes under the Forbes 400 list of 2020, making his mark as one of the influential personalities of the globe.
Billionaire entrepreneur Cuban is all bullish on the ultimate future of cryptocurrency and often holds comparison of blockchain technology to the earliest days of the internet. This is the reason why he held on to some of the digital currency coins that he got in the early days back then.
According to sources, total Cuban currency consists of 60 percent bitcoin, 30 percent Ethereum, and 10 percent of the rest. When we talk about Bitcoin, we know how it is the largest cryptocurrency by market value and is of special appeal to Cuban due to value rather than as a currency.
Cuban’s Success with the NFTs
He believed in the value cryptocurrency held when back in 2012, people thought of it as just a digital innovation that is not going to withstand the harsh weather of the climate. Cuban knew at that very moment that it is going to be something that would hold a lot of value because of its algorithmic scarcity, which makes it even a better alternative than gold.
This is the belief that led the famous investor to never let himself actually sell the cryptocurrency – when the asset is reserved, it increases in its value. Another thing that amplified his investment game was the invention of something called smart contracts – for example, ether currency running on it. Smart contracts are actually the collections of code that process some instructions and then get processed on the blockchain. These pave the way for decentralized finance, called DeFi in technical terms, and NFTs – the Non-fungible Tokens.
NFTs were something that really got the interest of the famous billionaire with their uniqueness.
What are NFTs?
Just like Bitcoin, NFT or Non-fungible Tokens are also a form of cryptocurrency. Instead of holding actual money, they hold creative assets such as music and art. A fungible token, on the other hand, is an asset that is interchangeable on a one-for-one basis. Similar to the fiat currencies like the dollars or the cryptos such as Bitcoin, each one of them comes with exact similar values and can be used for trading freely.
On the contrary, an object which is non-fungible comes with its own distinctive value, such as a classic car or an old house. Now, cross the notion with the concept of blockchain, the technology underpinning the crypto currencies, and there you get – NFTs.
These are the digital certificates showing effective authenticity, which are to be attached to digital art or anything else coming in the digital form – be it video clips, audio files, this written article, or even animated stickers.
We see how amazingly NFTs are here to change the way we look at ownership of so many things available to us virtually – especially digital artwork – a main purpose of NFTs is that these can be utilized for tracing the digital provenance of an object which enables a selected few to prove the total ownership of the material. In a broader aspect, it is a great way to develop scarcity for the ownership and decrease the production of the artificiality in place. This way, you are able to sell something for much higher prices, all thanks to the amazing factor of scarcity that it brings forward.
Popular NFT Sales in 2021
Beeple’s “First 5000 Days” was the digital artwork that got valued as the most expensive non-fungible token being sold in 2021 at $69 Million USD, with most of the other projects branching from collectibles and gaming. Enjin’s ENJ, Theta Network’s THETA, Axie Infinity’s AXS, and Sandbox’s SAND are some of the many important blockchain gaming-focused and NFT projects that we have seen a rerating in the current months.
Major marketplaces for NFT, like Opensea and Rarible, also saw their sales improved everywhere from 50 to 100 fold in the months of January, February, and March.
The growth span for the NFT marketplace is sky-rocketing in recent months for a lot of companies. For example, Opensea saw a total of 5 million USD of cumulative sales in only the first week of January 2021. Since then, it saw the cumulative sales slot spiking over a 100 million USD mark through the span of three months.
Cuban’s Interest in the NFTs
Cuban has definitely gone gaga over this amazing opportunity – he has promoted non-fungible tokens on NBA Top Shot, Mintable, Rarible, and OpenSea, which is a platform for trading, buying, and sharing your NFTs.
The Interesting Chain of Cuban’s Minting
Cuban started trading ten copies of the digital GIF (0.02 ETH each) for the price of $30 as of today. This is where it gets interesting. If we look at the transaction history of Mark Cuban, you will come to know this was listed for sale on January 27. On the same day, the first copy was bought for the price of 0.02 ETH. Nine copies were left for sale. Another user bought five further copies of the 0.02 ETH each. The last four copies were also bought in the last few hours of the day by different users as well, all for another 0.02 ETH each.
One of the buyers put the copy for resale for 5 ETH each, which amounts to $7000, which was bought within minutes at the exact same demanding price. The chain goes on, with each succeeding user putting the ETH price putting price a little higher than the one preceding them. As the chain went higher like that, one of the users who put Cuban’s work on sale for 0.02 ETH previously now enlisted it for 35 ETH, which is equivalent to $49,000. Another user followed the footsteps of that user and put the work for 30 ETH.
This is where the fun part gets even wilder. A user buys them both in a combination of 65 ETH. The user, after buying it, burned that edition to make it rare. He has now placed a bid of 10 WETH for the other eight editions that no one has accepted yet. We can see how the algorithm of scarcity is working here. With fewer and fewer copies of digital work bought through NFTs in the market, there is more value put in the asset.
This is to explain the interesting phenomenon filled with twists and turns that explain how NFTs can help create scarcity and help collectors place real value in their digital assets without having to actually physically own that asset.
Final Word
We see, investing in the new cryptocurrency NFT seems like to be one wise option one can choose – the ability for it to become scarce so easily is what we absolutely love about NFTs. Mark Cubans knew how they are going to change the way we look at ownership, and by taking a closer look at how the chain actually works, he knew he could build some solid assets relative to gold through these blockchains.
