Unchained - Mark Cuban on Why He Thinks ETH Is a Better Store of Value Than Bitcoin - Ep.226

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

Mark Cuban -- billionaire investor, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Shark Tank “shark” -- shares his thoughts on the Ethereum vs. BTC debate, issues with DeFi, and how NFTs could change content distribution. Tune in to hear Mark talk about... why ETH is a better store of value than BTC (1:08) why bitcoin as an inflation hedge is a bananas narrative 6:29) his opinion on EIP-1159 and the idea of proof of stake mining (9:06) why minting an NFT was a crypto-lightbulb moment for him (11:36) how his background in technology prepared him to invest in crypto (13:55) the main problem with the DeFi user experience and his advice for new DeFi users (16:34) what might happen to the centralized banking system if DeFi becomes the norm (20:46) how putting private data on a blockchain could work (25:53) why CBDC’s make “perfect sense” (32:11) how he evaluates decentralized business models and governance structures (41:13) his NFT investment thesis (47:09) who he believes will be the NFT winners in the long term (52:09) why Mavs tickets are a perfect example for how NFTs may be used in the future (54:55) industries that are ripe for NFT disruption (59:45) the many use cases for NFTs (1:01:48) why he is advising against minting social tokens (1:04:15)   Thank you to our sponsors!  Download the Crypto.com app and get $25 with the code “Laura”: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unchainedcardearnfeb2    Indexed Finance: https://indexed.finance/    Kyber Network: Dmm.exchange   Episode Links   Mark Cuban Personal website: https://markcubancompanies.com/marks-bio/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcuban    NFT Investment Lazy.com https://lazy.com/  https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/98974/mark-cuban-digital-art-gallery-nft Mintable https://cryptoslate.com/mark-cuban-invests-undisclosed-sum-in-nft-platform-mintable/ Esprezzo https://blog.esprezzo.io/esprezzo-raises-round-to-bring-no-code-automation-to-crypto-investors-nft-creators-collectors-defi-users OpenSea https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/nft-marketplace-opensea-raises-23-million-from-a16z/  SuperRare https://www.coindesk.com/cuban-chamath-back-nft-marketplace-superrares-9m-series-a Other https://markcubancompanies.com/blockchain/   Other Links Defiant Podcast (“ETH Has An Advantage Over Bitcoin”)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdGseBuuq_I Why DeFi is the Future | Mark Cuban on the Bankless Podcast https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-why-defi-is-the-future-mark-cuban Mark Cuban: The Billionaire Crypto Degen on the Delphi Podcast https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/mark-cuban-the-billionaire-crypto-degen/ NFTs as ticketing disruptor https://cryptoslate.com/forget-overvalued-artwork-mark-cuban-sees-nft-ticketing-as-the-mass-market-disruptor/ Bananas video (2:16-3:49) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBlN9o6Azc  CoinDesk interview https://www.coindesk.com/mark-cuban-bitcoin-nfts-blockchain-dallas-mavericks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hike resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago, and as the senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency whole time. Follow Unchained on Twitter at Unchained underscore Pod, where you can find all sorts of content ranging through my weekly newsletter to updates on my upcoming book and a whole lot more. The crypto.com app lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto all in one place. Earn up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin and 14% interest on your stable coins. Paid weekly. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. The link is in the description. Indexed finance allows you to buy passively managed indices for crypto and DFI's hottest markets. Passive portfolios at your fingertips.

N-D-E-X-E-D-D-D-FINANCE. Khyper's dynamic market maker, D-M-M-M is the first D-Fi protocol designed to adapt to market conditions to optimize fees, maximize returns, and enable extremely high capital efficiency for liquidity providers. Today's guest is Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Shark Tank Shark, and now crypto and NFT investor. Welcome, Mark. Thanks for having me, Laura.

So you've said that you believe the odds are that people will use Eith as a store value and not Bitcoin. Can you explain why? Yeah, I didn't say not, but I think there's just significant differences between the two. Both of them effectively are platforms that enable a lot to happen. But Bitcoin right now has really evolved to be primarily a store value and it's very difficult to use it for anything else. It's, you know, if you want, it's become digital gold. And you can use it as a platform that enables other things, but it requires a whole lot more, right? It requires wrapping or doing a variety of other things.

And it really acts more as collateral, a lot collateral than anything else in order for it to gain additional utility. Whereas Ethereum, you know, there's just a lot more built-in utility in its organic and native form, right? Just the ability to use smart contracts organically and natively is just a significant difference right now. And it's not to say there are layer twos on blockchain, I mean on Bitcoin that create new value and create new opportunities. But you really have to work a lot harder on Bitcoin than you do on Ethereum. And then so for that store value aspect for Eve, like saying people will use it a lot, are you saying simply since they expect they'll use it, then they'll just hold on to it more naturally? No, not necessarily. I mean, obviously with 1559, everything changes, right? And what happens going forward is going to really impact how people perceive it specifically as a store of value.

But because people are using ETH to buy NFTs to do more things and because smart contracts just makes it a little bit simpler to do development and because we're looking at, you know, hopefully a shorter term evolution to ETH too. And I know we've been, a lot of people have been saying that for a long time. I think you'll see there's more reason. to buy ETH right now beyond just being a store of value. But it doesn't exclude, you know, being a store of value to buy Eath, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

And I also was curious because recently that Bitcoin, or what I was saying, PayPal, has enabled U.S. users to pay with Bitcoin, Ether, Lightcoin, and Bitcoin cash merchants. And I know that the Dallas Mavericks did briefly accept Bitcoin as payment. And I just wondered what your opinion was of this. offering? It goes back. You know, actually, we started accepting Bitcoin. 2017 is when we started. And, you know, people have always looked at me as a Bitcoin skeptic. And let me explain why. And so, I mean, obviously I've been familiar with Bitcoin since it's, you know, initiation, at least my initiation to it, you know, 2012 or earlier when I first got involved with playing around with Coinbase and got

exposed to it. And back then, it was really the narrative around Bitcoin was that it was going to be a currency. And to me, I never saw Bitcoin as a currency. And if you look back to any conversation I've had about it, I've always been really positive about blockchain. I was one of those people that was positive on blockchain, saw Bitcoin as a store of value, but thought it was crazy that people thought it would be a currency because there just wasn't the ability in its network to to handle transactions, and it wasn't very simple for a grandma to come in or grandpa to come in and use it easily. And so I wanted to see if my thesis was right, you know, by the time 2017 rolled around, and we were able to get a payment gateway set up. So, you know, my attitude was if people wanted to spend

Bitcoin as a currency, let's see if they'll do it. I'll discount Mavs merchandise and Mavs tickets, and nobody did. And, you know, it was more an experiment to see if I was. wrong. And as it turns out, you know, Bitcoin really is not designed to be a currency. And, you know, there's lots of people that have been talking about the Lightning Network for years and the changes. But as we saw in 2017, you know, there's a reason why there's there's a Bitcoin cash, right? There's a reason why there was, you know, there were a lot of hard feelings in what happened with Bitcoin in 2017. And the underpinning of that was that it was not going to be, you know, traditional Bitcoin was not going to be a currency.

And that's really where, you know, people have had disagreements with me on my stance. But, you know, here we are in 2021. And now people think you're crazy if you spend your Bitcoin, you know, and if you use it as a currency. And that said, you know, a little aside, just because I'm part of the crew and I'm a Bitcoin believer as a store of value, I'm making an exception. And I had already ordered a new Tesla a few months ago. And so when that Tesla gets ready to get shipped,

I'm going to buy some new Bitcoin. I'm not going to get rid of any of my existing Bitcoin and use it to buy my Tesla. Yeah, that's smart for the capital gains tax reasons. Right. Yeah, so one thing that is interesting, which you kind of pointed out, is that you do have a contrarian view to a lot of Bitcoiners. And another thing that you said, which I found interesting, this was on the Defiant podcast, was that you don't see that there will be any correlation between what the Federal Reserve does and the price of Bitcoin. And I just wanted to hear why I'm not because that is obviously very different opinion from a lot of people. Yeah, look, you know, any alternative asset, any asset period that is looking for appreciation

has to be sold with narratives, has to be. A share stock, right? Apple computer used to be a cyclical stock and went up and down with cyclicals. Now it's a gross stock. You know, you can just make, you can look at any stock, any asset from baseball cards to gold in particular, and there's got to be a narrative. The narrative for gold historically has been a hedge against. Dunes Day, a hedge against inflation. It's not. It never has been. You know, that's just the

narrative that people use. And I mean, I've never, if you go back to the things I've said over the years and written on blogmaverick.com, I've always thought gold was kind of a joke, you know, that there was no true intrinsic value other than some, you know, industrial manufacturing. And true gold holds the color better than most metals, but no one needs gold jewelry. You know, It's not like the world can't survive without gold jewelry. So, you know, the narrative that it's precious helps build value. And Bitcoin kind of is the same way. There is no true connection between inflation other than the fact that all assets

could go up in price, right, with inflation. And Bitcoin could be one of them, but so could the cost of a car and so could, you know, anything else for that matter, cost of bananas. And so there's no real proof or tie there. But it's a great narrative. If the Federal Reserve keeps on printing money, then you need an asset other than the Federal Reserve that you can hold in order to offset the inevitable inflation that comes with it.

Great narrative. Nothing, in fact, that shows that that correlation will hold. And it's the same with gold. You know, if it were up to me, we'd sell all the gold in Fort Knox And whether we put it in Bitcoin, bananas, or use that money to pay for people to eat, which is my preference, you know, to provide food for people so they don't go hungry, there's no correlation and there won't be other than the natural inflation of all assets. Okay. By the way, I do love how you keep talking about Bitcoin and bananas because there is a famous video of you saying you'd rather have bananas over Bitcoin. People can look that up. I actually just want to ask, or I'll put it in the show, but I do want to go back to what you were talking about, Ethereum Improvement Proposal. 559. This is the one where the transaction fees will be burned on the Ethereum network instead of being sent to the miners. And I wondered what you thought that would do for the price of

Eith. And then if you would like project out into the future, how that would kind of affect kind of this like Bitcoin versus Ethereum narrative, which is sort of like a weird narrative because they're just different things. But I was just curious to hear. You know, who knows exactly? I mean, I'm not trying to be a prognosticator on pricing or anything like that. But if we get to proof of stake. When we get to proof of state, you know, the holdback of the impact on the environment will change immediately. And that is going to give some people a reason to use Ethereum as a store of value over Bitcoin right there. The fact that with proof of stake, you're going to be able to have, you know, some multiple, significantly higher multiple in transactions per second.

that's going to improve the utilization and the opportunities to create on Bitcoin. You know, the advancements in applications for smart contracts. Right now, you know, we see quite a bit of utilization of smart contracts for NFTs, but those are really just proof of concepts for what can happen in the business world. Applications like insurance, legal documents, the list of applications, everything that you do using digital right now, there can be a better distributed database, decentralized application that can be done on Ethereum.

And so, you know, I think the applications leveraging smart contracts and extensions on Ethereum will draw Bitcoin, right? So Bitcoin will be a store of value, but because it has to be done using miners, you can't just switch to proof of stake with Bitcoin. There is going to be some hesitancy. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to sell my Bitcoin.

I'm not. But at the same time, I think, let's just say I own a lot more Ethereum's than I do Bitcoin's. Wow. Although I did hear that at least the percentage of your portfolio is still small. It's like, I think, half of it, half of what you own in Bitcoin in terms of dollars. Is that right? Yeah, I'm close, yeah.

Okay. You obviously have known about Bitcoin for a while. You've been a little bit of skeptic in terms of its use as, a currency. So now it seems like you are all in on crypto and defy and NFTs. And I just wondered, what for you were some of your light bulb moments? Well, you know, I like to geek out on new technology, whether, you know, I'm the guy that, you know, is AI started, I started become more aware of AI. I'm going on, you know, AWS and doing machine learning tutorials. I'm taking YouTube classes and Coursera classes on creating JavaScript, you know, three-layer neural networks,

just so I can have an understanding because as an entrepreneur and as an investor, you know, you've got to be able to tell what's real and what's bullshit, right? And so, and have a basic, at least a basic understanding, if not more. And the same thing applied to NFTs. And, you know, I was, I was, I'm always a skeptic by nature until I go in there and find a reason not to be. And so I went on mintable. app because I read that it was the cheapest place for a newbie to get in and try to mint things. And when I did my first NFT, as I was going through filling out everything for this little file that I was in this picture, I was doing the mint. It showed me royalties and it showed me all these other features that were part of the smart contracts.

And I was like, oh, my goodness, you mean for the first time ever I can take a digital file and mint it, turn it into an NFT, put it on the blockchain, and earn royalties post, you know, earn income post first sale. Because that never had happened before with any digital file, not MP3s, not digital photos, not videos, not anything. And to me, that was just like, okay, that turned the light bulb on. And it was like, okay, now I got to learn about smart contracts. And with smart contracts, I did my solidity, just like I did with AI, I did my solidity tutorials and understood, you know, how the variables worked

and what couldn't happen and, you know, the different features that were there and weren't there and extensions that carried and didn't, all those things. And so, but it was literally the fact that you could earn royalties and that was a standard that should be, not always is, but should be that should carry across all layer two and higher applications on the blockchain. I just, I love this because, I mean, so for me as a creator, the royalties thing also, the second I understood that, I was like, wow, like I would love to take it. It's a game changes.

Yeah. Yeah. And I was curious. So obviously you have a huge, you know, long background and technology and all kinds of things. But I also thought, well, maybe your perspective as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, which is a completely different type of industry from the crypto industry, or just your experience as a shark on shark tank, which heavily takes pitches from a variety of different industries. I wonder, do you think that that shaped your views in a different way from the typical crypto investor about what will be the truly big things?

Yeah. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So you got to go back to my early history. Like after getting fired from a software job when I was 24, I started a company called Micro Solutions that effectively was a systems integrator. And I taught myself to program. I was in my 20s and it was just like I spent the next seven years writing software that worked on first local area networks and wide area networks and then replicated databases. And so, you know, my whole reason for existing as a systems integrator was walking into a company and allowing them to digitize what they were doing and to.

turn, you know, like Mark Andreessen said, software eats the world. And so help, you know, help software eat their businesses. And then I sold that, took some time off, traded stocks, various things. And then in late 94, early 95, I got together with a friend that was like, how can we use this new thing called the internet to be able to listen to Indiana basketball while we're in Dallas? And it was like, okay, well, I have a background in databases and networking and programming.

Let me see what we can figure out. And literally, you know, know, there was nobody streaming at the time. And that's how I, you know, it was like, okay, how do we solve this problem? Well, let's find a solution. And we started a company called AudioNet, which was one of the first, if not the first streaming companies to really get the thing going. And, you know, obviously we sold that years later, or five years, four, what was it, five years later to Yahoo.

But, you know, then, you know, I started the first all high definition TV network. And, you know, so my history. has always been, okay, here's something, here's new technology. How can I apply it to industries and businesses to try to change the game and disrupt them? And so I take the same perspective here, you know, looking at what's happening with layer one, whether it's blockchain, I mean, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, any of the other blockchain competitors, how can you use them to disrupt traditional business? And I look at what's happening with NFTs, as I said earlier, just as a proof of concept. It's like, okay, if we can do this with art and music, pictures, and

some video, then where else could we apply them to really change industry? So let's now talk about Defi. You've talked about the difficulties in the user experience for people to use Defi. What do you see is the main user experience problems that need to be resolved? And then once those are resolved, what do you think our future will look like? Trust. Trust is the biggest problem, right? Because there's a an inherent conflict, you know, defy decentralized. And historically, when we've dealt with our money and our finances, we've gone to people that we trust. And when you look, we've always been taught that it looks too good to be true. It probably is. And there's a lot of that in defy right now where

there are a lot of places where you can, you know, year farm and pull and, you know, get APY that looks really, really, really good until you really start to dig in and analyze the risk. And it's not that some can't make you a lot of money if you're careful and really do the homework they can. There's a lot of good companies, but there's a lot of pinesy schemes and a lot of rug pullers out there that really make it really difficult for newbies and people who don't have the time to invest to really do the homework to make it work. And what would you advise people like that who are interested in getting into defy that they should do in order to, you know, not become the victims of scans like that?

You just got to do your homework, right? I mean, you can't get caught up in what you see in social media, you know, particularly for defy. You've got to look at, you know, I tell people to look at, you know, Aves compounds, you know, places that have been around for a while that have a history that you can look at because there's trust there. Because even in a decentralized environment, you've got to find organizations that you can trust. You've got to find communities, I guess, is a better way than organization,

communities that you can trust. Because even with the Dow's out there, you know, if somebody, you know, if you don't understand the Dow of a particular defy environment, a big holder can take things in a direction completely opposite to what you expected or what you had hoped for when you got involved with something. And so, you know, and then there's something new popping up every single day, this decks, that decks, you know, and then there's different blockchains. This is on PolkaDOT.

This is on NIR. This is on Maddox. You know, this is on crypto, this is on this, this is on that. And, you know, as all these places search for liquidity and LPs, liquidity providers, in order to be able to have some balance for their exchanges, that's confusing. And you also see scenarios where, you know, as people state, there's a lot of money out there, but there's not unlimited amount of money to be able to, you know, lock into all these different platforms. And so it's just really, really confusing unless you really put into time to know exactly what you're doing or work with people that you can trust.

And the other thing I say to people is, you know, the reason why it's worth putting the money in, even if you build in, you know, a 30% loss, right? You know, it's not when I say loss, it's not that there's a rug pull, but, you know, maybe the price that you expected with the API by the time you tried to liquidate tokens that you were given, you know, the prices drop significant. and you weren't able to get there. And that's the big thing. And then finally, the third thing I tell them is a lot of small players can't afford to do D5 because of the expenses, the gas fees that are involved. And so, yeah, on other chains, there are different opportunities that don't have the gas fees.

But even so, there's always going to be a cost somewhere. None of this is for free. And so you've got to be able to scale at some level or at least commence. for a long, long time. And smaller, smaller users, particularly smaller new users, may not have that financial flexibility. And so, you know, particularly on Ethereum based up, you see a ton of people that you talk to that, you know, they put up $500. And by the time they go to hit the, you know, the confirm and they look to see that their gas fees, you know, are going to eat up anything they could possibly earn unless they stay in it for 17 years, you know, it becomes a shock for them.

have to be your homework. So once all these issues are resolved and the transaction fees are lowered and scaling, you know, is resolved, what do you think will happen to the banking system? Well, do you imagine just everybody will start keeping their savings and yield farming tokens and giving themselves their own loans on their own crypto assets via smart contracts? And yeah, it's a great question. I don't know yet, right? It really depends on how nimble and agile the incumbents are, the legacy banks are. I mean, they're not stupid, right? But they do have invest in interest in keeping things the same way. And again, it's going to come down to who do people trust. People who are in the crypto community don't trust banks at all, but the other 95% of the

country, in the U.S., at least, they do trust banks. And, you know, there's federal deposit insurance. There as a backstop that increases that trust. And so it really is going to come down, to where the trust points are. I mean, in trying to advise some of the organizations that the communities that work with, excuse me, I think partnering with a bank to teach them, Defi, is going to be what happens quite a bit. Because a lot of the Dexas, you know, they've got a ton of money. They're crushing it right now.

And they're making money hand over foot. And so what I've advised them is go work with a bank and teach those bank tellers that we've all grown up trusting, right? You grew up in Youngstown. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and we all had our first bank account where we went in and maybe we're 15, maybe we're 21. I mean, now the KYC rules are made a little bit more difficult. But, you know, going in and seeing a bank teller or someone sitting at a desk in a bank

location and a bank outlet and sitting and walking through all these things because we trust them. And, you know, yeah, that's just part of a narrative. I'm not saying it's necessarily better. It's not. but going to places that we're we already trust that have FDIC behind them, I think that is going to be most likely as it stands right now. You know, part of the challenge for D5 for newbies is that there's no barriers to entry for D5. And it's just like 1995 with the internet where everybody with a URL popped up and had a new, you know,

internet website business, you know, and people were investing in them left and right, hoping that, you know, whether it was a private or public company, the value of their investment just skyrocketed because they saw it happening all around them. And there's a lot of that going on where everybody's got a scheme built around D5. And we've got to be able to get to some folks that are the winners that we trust so that people who don't fully understand it can do it. And once we get there, the technical stuff will take care of itself. But once we get there, then you'll start seeing a change. And then you'll start seeing, you know, new structured products where people can say, okay, I'm not going to yield farm, but I'm going to

make, you know, the 10, the yield on a 10 year treasury is 1.75. And what they're paying for traditional savings is 0.02 or 0.2, let's say, since interest rates are up a little bit, and I can make 4% in a trusted manner. I think that's where it'll really take off. And I know that's not crypto ethos, right? It's not, you know, and it's not as wild, wild west, but most people don't like the Wild Wild West with their money. Right now, much of Defi works on over collateralization. How do you think that affects the market? And what do you think will happen as Defi moves away from that?

I think it's great, actually. I think it's a challenge if it starts to move away from over collateralization, at least in the next couple years, because over collateralization, particularly with the volatility of pricing for the assets that are being used, is a protection point that makes it safe and trustable. That's what makes a smart contract work because if there's not over collateralization and a volatile, with a volatile asset backing it, then how's the smart contract going to work? You know, what's it going to take in the event that whatever it is, you know, that loan that you took for, you know, 50% of your assets, you know, what happens if those start to collapse, right? Because there's a bad market turn.

Then people lose trust in it. So I think over collateralization is good. I think the fact that people are trying to use real world assets, IRL assets to collateralize them, to extend Defi, I think is challenging, and it will be for a long time because legally it's going to be very difficult to assign all the legal rights you need to take control of a building, you know, or a piece of artwork, a physical piece of artwork or whatever it may be out of a smart contract. I don't see someone, you know, all of a sudden, the deed to a home being conveyed

out of a smart contract because the price of the home dropped like it did in 2006, let's say, or whenever, 2010 rather. So that's going to be a challenge. You've talked about how things like insurance claims could have decentralized validators to determine whether or not a claim is legitimate, or you've talked about how financial scandals like Enron could have been prevented with decentralized network. works of accountants validating general literature entries. And I wonder, since these examples require access to private data, how would that work? Would that be using like a private blockchain, or is that using zero knowledge proofs? Or were you just spitballing? No, no, no. I mean, look,

you know, you start with simple applications. So I forget the name of this company, but effectively, they're selling insurance for real world, right? And so what they, they use oracles that have precipitation and temperature for a specific zip code because that weather is available as an article through the National Weather Service or conveyed from the National Weather Service data. And so it's not inconceivable that the Dallas Mavericks could say, you know what, if temperature drops to below zero Fahrenheit and there's more than two inches of precipitation, which means it's snowing and it's awful cold, then there's a good chance that people aren't going to be able to come to a Dallas Mavericks game. So I'm going to buy insurance that I know

the smart contract convey. So, you know, I work it out with the insurance company. We memorialize it to a smart contract that it costs me $1,000 and I get paid $10,000 if this unlikely event happens. And it's triggered immediately, you know, once the, the Oracle is refreshed and shows that these data thresholds have been met. That's a great application. Now, in terms of extending that to validators. Yes, you've got to deal with very personal information, but you can break up that data so it's impossible to know who the person is. Right. So it doesn't need to know Laura or Mark or Jeff or Brian or Jake or Alexis, right? It could be privacy through security through obscurity, if you will. It's just looking to say, okay, here's the claim for tonsillitis. And this is what

it shows on the insurance claim. And this is the information that is available from the insurance smart contract saying, you know, here are the codes, here are the hospital diagnosis codes that are in play. And, well, I guess tonsilis is a bad example. Let's say broken, broken arm. Consolice would be a dentist, but you get my point, right? So you would just be able to have it, you know, you wouldn't have any personal information. First of all, it would just be somebody with a broken on. It doesn't fit the requirements of the smart contract. And boom, then you, then, you know, you have X number of validators who have to agree. It's kind of like what optimism does, right? So optimism in the way they approach, it isn't the, the, the, the, the KP side of it, or ZP,

or is it ZP? Zero. Yeah. ZK. Yeah. Sorry, I'm still learning. ZK, yeah. But with optimism, what they do is they, they have enough validators. and they look for the fraud, right? So if everybody is going through and looking to validate, and then there's also people looking to see if any of the validators were fraudulent or however exactly they do it, then you can do these types of things.

And now all of a sudden, instead of having an insurance company who's making centralized decisions with their only real goal to maximize earnings as opposed to optimist health and just follow the rules that they agree to, now all of a sudden with this distributed validators, You can do it quickly and automatically effectively,

and you're going to have a lot happier customers and a lot better health care system. Great. So in a moment, we're going to talk about NFTs, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Betmoor activated. The ScoreBet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game?

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top assets for that market. D5 has been the best performing DFI index available with over 400% growth since its inception in December. Get D55 and others such as the new NFT index today at indexed dot finance. That's I-N-D-X-E-D dot finance. With over 10 million users, crypto.com is the easiest place to buy and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 with the code Laura. If you're a hodler, crypto.com earn pays industry-leading interest rates on over 30 coins, including Bitcoin, at up to 8.5% interest and up to 4.4.4. 14% interest on your stable coins. When it's time to spend your crypto, nothing beats the

crypto.com visa card, which pays you up to 8% back instantly and gives you 100% rebate for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. There is no annual or monthly fees to worry about. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 when using the code Laura, L-A-U-R-A. The link is in the description. Back to my conversation with Mark Cuban. So before we get into NFTs, I just wanted to ask one other thing that's kind of related to Defi and the other issues we were talking about with banking. And on the bankless podcast, you said, quote, USDC issued by the Treasury makes perfect sense. And I wondered, did you mean like an actual central bank digital currency issued by the Fed? Or are you in favor as former CFTC chairman Christopher John Carlo is of many,

private USDA stable coins such as USC that compete with each other? It really depends on how, yes, I'm for a central bank coin, digital coin, CBDC, but it really depends on the implementation, right? The devil's in the details. And so, you know, if it's a typical government product, there's going to be holes and needs and problems with it, and that's where the private sector will fill in. And so Jeremy Aller can do his thing with Circle and USC and as can others. but the reality is it makes too much sense now to not have CBDC.

It really, you know, and one of the points I've been making is we lose money on every penny nickel, diamond quarter that would manufacture, you know, and that turns out to be hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And you could spend, you'd have to invest a little bit more out front, but by transitioning to a GBDC, you know, there's so many things we can do that would make life better for our citizens. You know, we look at the stimulus program and there are a lot of people that don't have direct deposit into a bank account, right? Every single citizen, you know, legal resident of this country should be required to have, you know, some form of digital account, whether it's for fiat and or digital currency. And in the event, we need stimulus again,

and it'll happen again at some point. Now just transmitting a, you know, GBDC to people and it's fiat, you know, effectively. That's a good thing for the country. It allows us to be a lot more agile and deal with problems that we run into. Then, of course, there's the reduction of friction just in terms of the banking system itself and being able to move money around in ways, you know, that are far easier as we get money to banks. Now, that doesn't mean USDC and other stable coins can't do their, thing, right? Because they're going to find better ways to implement themselves and to connect with all

the applications that are out there. And that doesn't mean, look, you know, this is a very Darwinian business. And what the government does, what the Fed does will be probably 50% of what everybody wants it to do or suggest it should do and the market will fill in the rest. And new applications, you know, and technology involves, who knows what quantum computing is going to do to all of this, you know, we could be talking a post-crypto world 50 years from now or 100 years from now. Who knows? Now, I won't be talking about it. You won't be talking about it, but somebody's going to be talking about it 100 years from now. And so you have to start thinking in terms of, you know, that far into the future. And so, yeah, there's great applications here. The entrepreneurs will

fill in the rest, but, you know, you still have to always realize there's going to be something different that we don't envision that pops up. Yeah, in a way I actually think the central bank will be forced to innovate here because if DeFi really does take off and people are holding their savings in these crypto assets, then they'll need to be offering something to motivate people to hold onto their U.S. dollars. All right. All right.

All right now. So that's interesting. Let's go back. So that's interesting. Okay. Go ahead. So you think that if people are given a GBDC. CBDC.

CBDC, right? Yeah. CBTC is the gray scale, the coin trust. Very similar. But you think that because, well, a CBDC won't necessarily be global, right? Because every sovereign nation is going to try to do something on their own. But since where the reserve currency, you think that the U.S. Federal Reserve will have to compete in order to get people to use the CBDC that they issue as,

as opposed to other stable coins or other cryptocurrencies? Well, it was more than I was just thinking, you know, like when I've talked to people about defy, just my normal friends, like not crypto people. And then they kind of poke around and then, you know, they'll be like, oh, you can earn that. Like, they're kind of amazed by the interest, right? Right. And then I can see that light ball moment for them and they're a little bit. Like, these are people who otherwise have zero interest in this kind of thing.

And so then I could see, oh, they're kind of like, hmm, that's interesting. Maybe I should like put a little bit in it. And so I just realized like, oh, once things like the ease of using a crypto wallet and whatever, all that gets resolved, I could see a lot of people being motivated to once they believe that the software works and they trust it to just move a lot of their money in. Remember, see, the thing about that, though, is nobody gives something away for free, right? There's nobody reaching into their pocket in defy saying, you know what, I want less. you take more.

Right now, just the ecosystem of defy is such that as these new businesses pop up, and effectively that's what they are. They have to pay to get liquidity in order to be able to run their business. But, you know, effectively what they do is they just push the risk further and further out. Gary Gensler, the guy who's running the SEC used to run the federal, what is it, the CFTC? And he said one thing that's always stuck with me. the risk doesn't leave the system. And that's true for crypto as well.

What the new D5 protocols do and new offerings do, they just move the risk to a different token or a different liquidity provider, right? So they're saying to an LP that, you know, and they say it right up front, there's a chance you're going to lose what you've staked here. There's a chance that you're going to lose it. And I'm using your money in order to be able to go get more of the liquidity.

And to get that, I'm going to be paying out in my tokens that we've created and that you've purchased. And so if they're not able to turn it into a really stable business, you know, hence stable coins, but if they're not able to turn it into a stable business, so their tokens retainer value, somebody's going to lose. And that's part of the challenge. You've got, you know, so in a lot of cases, DFI is still a game of musical chairs. And that's why I said earlier, you have to be careful because it's not until,

somebody's got to create something in order for there to be a sustained return that brings new money, new validated money into the system, right? And you're starting to see that with a lot of the business applications, right? I mean, that's where PolkaDOT is pretty cool, right? Because PolkaDOT's really designed for unique applications on people who want to modify the blockchain to their specific vertical need, right? And so, you know, that's where you create productivity. If you we're going to, you know, whether it's Ethereum, you know, Maddo, you know, is used for a lot of NFT stuff, if you're going to create new applications that create productivity over, you know, FinTech applications. So, you know, old banking, then came FinTech. Now there's open banking

and now there's DeFi banking, right? And they all compete. And when DeFi banking does a better job or crypto with blockchain applications does a better job than fintech or traditional digital applications, like a docuSign as an example, and our Airbnb, you know, in their software. You know, if crypto eats the software that was eating the world, then defy can really perform because those software applications that are being used in applications on blockchain that are creating new productivity, then those tokens will accrete value and get more valuable, right? If they don't, if it's just purely a DFI play where it's like, look, I want your money, I think I can get enough people trading money, you know, and making money using these

trades, it works until it doesn't. And so I don't think anybody disagrees that a lot of these, you know, a significant percentage of these DFI plays are going to go out of business, right? It's the ones that actually have a foundation and offer some productivity. over what was done before. So you see it like I invested in injective protocol. And there are distributed decks that uses order books as opposed to being an AMM. And that's a productivity enhancement where you can trade with perks a lot better than you could trade the way things are done now.

And if they're able to become a better place to trade the equivalent of stocks, then their token will be worth more because they're creating value that, is more value than the incumbents are creating, if that all makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting is, like, in a way, I think what you're describing in terms of whether or not these things are sustainable is that model that has come from startups

where a lot of the early growth is subsidized. But what's so interesting here is that because these are decentralized networks and there isn't, and especially when you throw in the governance, then so actually, but that's a question for you, obviously with your experience with all these different startups you've done, and then obviously working with Shark Tank and investing in those, when you think about this new decentralized model, how are you evaluating whether or not you think something will be successful?

And how is that different from what you've done so far? That's a great question. And by the way, Shark Tank's on Friday nights on ABC. But, you know, it's really, really interesting because you talked about the subsidy model that is kind of like the Silicon Valley way. raise a whole lot of money and subsidize the product and then make it up some other way, you know, create a sticky product that everybody has to have, you know, lose a lot of money on it, and then eventually you'll make money on it.

I've never been a big fan of that, you know, and so if you watch me on Shark Tank, you know, I don't mind losing money at the beginning if you have a direct path to profitability, but I'm never a fan of, okay, let's just get a ton of customers and we'll figure out how to make money later. that's that's never good even in the infancy of an industry um you've got to know exactly how you're going to get there so when it comes to doubts and how to deal with um governance you know it really depends on the particulars because and the type of applications that are in place because some some forms of governance are just based on who has the most tokens right and at that point in time everything can get bastardized you know you look at some of these

What's the best way? These worlds, right? These unique worlds and the games that are part of them right now, those have been around a long, long time. And historically, what's happened is that the people who are the most active users end up gaining the most control and massaging it to look the way that they want it. And that's a challenge for all of them. Like, you know, I'm excited about Axi Infinity.

I think it's really, really cool. but it's really, really cool because, you know, there's a variety of different options with the governance, and they're able to sell sponsorships and advertising and bring in external money, so they're not only dependent on the players. And because they bring in external money, that means there's ways to, for, you know, really players who don't have any money at all to start participating and actually make a little bit of an income, no matter where they are in the world. But the key to that all working is bringing in external money.

It's kind of like what Fortnite does with V-Bucks, right? And other games, you know, with the currencies that they create that have no place, no value outside of the game. Well, with this, you know, it changes it. So with the tokens, it has value outside the game. But in terms of governance, you have to be really, really careful that the dominant users don't dominate governance because they're all going to conform it. It's just like a shareholder owning 51% or controlling a board or having enough of a stake of a company that has a lot of shareholders and not a lot of big shareholders and really influencing all the outcomes.

It's really, really hard to manage over time and we don't have a long enough history to understand it. So it's something that I try to be very careful about and understand completely when I get involved because just as positive as decentralization can be. versus centralized corporations. And communities, it can have a completely different impact where the loudest voices can change things so that the smallest players, you know, it's like we see in politics. Politics are politics, right?

And people strive for power, and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and distributed governance isn't necessarily different because most people don't participate. So it sounds like what you're saying is you feel like Dow's won't really, be effective or solve these issues until we have blockchain-based identities to prevent civil attacks? Well, it's not even just that, right? Just lack of participation. You know, some people play the

game because they like the game, right? Some people, you know, get involved with the token because they just want to make money and they don't want to, you know, they got their real lives to deal with. They don't want to be involved with, you know, trying to determine what to add or what not to add, you know, should the decks, you know, a distributed deck, add this token or not add this token, right? So, you know, it's not, if that's your token, why wouldn't you try to go in there and influence all the people to vote to add you, you know, because there's so much money at stake. And so there's, there's a lot of the nuanced elements of governance that traditional real life politics have that apply here as well. Because just like most people don't vote in elections in the real world, most people don't use their governance tokens in crypto communities. Yeah. Well, and then, but do you think delegated? proof of steak or any kind of like liquid model where you can delegate your votes. Do you think that results it or no?

Is that still part of that episode? So think about your friends, right, that, you know, just want to make their 4%, 8%, 12%, whatever it is. And they don't care which tokens they add and they don't want to know and they don't understand because they got a job to go to and, you know, and they got their vaccine and they want to go on and have fun. And last thing what they want to do is stay back in and read about the governance requirements of the tokens.

They just bought to make some money. True, true. From your comments, I definitely feel like, yes, you understand normal people probably better than the average crypto person. So let's talk about NFTs. So what is your thesis when it comes to your NFT investments? What characteristics do you believe will separate the winners from the also-rans? And you can even talk about, you know, why you chose to invest in Mintable and super rare open C, et cetera, as opposed to some of the other platforms. So a couple things there. In terms of what NFTs I buy. I buy the things that I like to look at, right? You know, so if I go through, if I'm on Mintable,

I'd love to go on Mintable to a gasless store because, you know, and the reason I invested at Mintable. Dot app is I went there first because it's where you can mint things for free and until you sell it, there's no gas fees, right? And so it goes right into Mintable's Gasless Store and they have it so that you can go through thousands and thousands of NFTs there.

And if, you know, because it's not right on the blockchain, it's not showing up across all the different platforms. And so that's where I love to buy things because there's things I go in there and I think they're just stunning. And, you know, they may only charge, you know, the equivalent of $25, you know, and the GASP fee might be $100, you know, once it gets rid of the Ethereum. But at the same time, it would have cost me a whole lot more than $125 to buy it on OpenC or on, you know, any of the other marketplaces that have already been.

where they've already been written to the Ethereum blockchain. And, you know, Mintpil uses Zilkla as well. So there's some things there. And just like OpenC's using Madic and others are using Madic and others. You know, so I like to go there as well because the fees are very low. So, you know, so my orientation is let's go find things I like because, you know, obviously, or maybe, you know, I started this thing called lazy.com. And I have it all in my social bios now and I put it in out,

I'll tweet about it and send it around. And so I want things that I pin to the top of there that look really cool and represent me because that's my own personal gallery. And so, you know, I collect as opposed to speculate. And there's just so, there's so much, so, so much talent out there that is looking for a home that I kind of look, try to look places where other people are not. So lazy.com for people who don't know it is literally just a website that displays the person who, you know, their URL, all their NFTs.

But actually, so when I asked about your NFT investments, I meant like in the platforms, like which. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just wanted to get the, I just wanted to get the little plug in there for blazy.com. Yeah. Which is a great site, by the way.

I do think it's a very clean design. Yeah, I appreciate that. And you build that yourself? Yeah. Well, I had a programmer. I outlined it and I laid it out and everything and I didn't have time to code it myself. so I had one of our guys coded. But yeah, it was all my design.

It looks great. Yeah, it's crazy because we've only been around 10 days today, and we had, as of yesterday, 120,000 users. So it's crazy. And so anyways, in terms of investing, so I invested in mintible.com, for the reason I just said, right, there are a lot of undiscovered artists on there that are putting up their work

because it's the one place where you can go in there and mint something for free, and it doesn't cost anything in two, you actually sell it. And it's your way to then, you know, show off and learn and really have a chance to sell with no cost. So I like that and their traffic is just exploding. I invested in OpenC because OpenC, you know, I looked at initially as a marketplace, but they're really the API for all marketplaces. They're kind of the be all end all behind the scenes that makes everything work. You know, at Lazy, if you click through, if you go to lazy.com slash Mark Cuban, there's a couple

things that I have that I put for sale. And when you click through, it takes you to OpenC, and that's because we use, you know, it's not an Oracle as an API that allows someone to buy, and it's all managed and handled by OpenC. So I like the fact that they're behind the scenes for all of that. I invested in super rare because they get great products. They get, you know, really great high-end, and super rare. NFTs that are out there. I invested in NIFTs because they're trying to create a social network. And there's some others that are working on social networking, but I think they've got a really great team to put it all together. I invested in espresso is. If you go to markcubin.com and you'll see there's a blockchain link and you can see all

the blockchain companies related companies I invested in. But espresso dot and with two zes instead of 2s.s.com.com. It's kind of like an if this than that, if you're familiar with that product, where it just continuously reads the blockchain and allows you to set triggers that send you reports or initiate different actions, which, you know, for somebody who's trying to invest or somebody who's trying to understand markets and track them, it's a great tool. And there's a couple others that are going to be closing very short. And so, but like when the NFT revolution fully plays out, like, what do you think will determine which, you know, platforms or other?

Who the winners are? Yeah, who the winners and a loser? So first, I think there's going to be a fair amount of winners because you're going to see a lot of this verticalized where they'll each have their own area of expertise. But I think probably within the next three, five years, you're going to see a huge consolidation where there's somebody who was on the outside looking in or somebody who got bigger that we didn't expect to get big and they buy up the others. They get their NFT base and get their customers, et cetera. You know, you see what Dapper is doing, and it's interesting because dapper, and actually all the competitive blockchains, because it's kind of like a death war with blockchains, right? You know, who's going to survive?

You know, flow, near, wax, who else? You know, crypto.com. I mean, there's just so many, Maddo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's hard to say that all of them are going to be, you know, equal size and equal have levels of success. But they're all doing fairly well right now. And because it doesn't take a lot of overhead to manage these, they're all, for the most part, making money. And I think because of that, they're in kind of a death war right now.

They're all starting to spend a lot to get really high-profile people and high-profile NFTs on their platforms in order to be, oh, and I left one out, Bitcoin origin, Jeremy Boren, those guys are incredible too. So if you go on wax and you look at Bitcoin origin, they're an investment because they're great storytellers. I don't want to leave them out to be really pissed at me. But you see my point that all, you thought in the early days of the internet as well, there's some businesses like blockchains that are zero-sum games. You don't, you know, the minute that Ethereum gets the 2.0,

if they can handle, and I'm just making 100,000 transactions per second, then you have to ask what happens to Binance and NIR and some of these other things when there's every reason to just start building layer two on top of, on top of Ethereum 2.0. Now, there's a lot of people don't think that, that can happen. But to go back to my original point, all those blockchains are spending a lot of money to really get people to use their blockchains. And they're using NFTs as an entry point by really trying to bring in the highest profile celebrities and creators and artists and musicians,

etc. to use their platform and to get people to buy and sell NFTs there. And that, they're not all going to win. And that'll lead to consolidation. That'll lead to some people, you know, going out of business. And in a few years, I think Ethereum and maybe two or three other blockchains will have their place, and those will be the winners. Now, let's talk about the NFTs themselves, which, as earlier we discussed, can be built with their own business models built right in, where the creator can specify what their cut would be for any resales. I heard you mention things like 30%, 50%, I saw for one of your NFTs, your royalties would be 15%

Euler Beats does 8% to the original LP owner. What, you know, do you think will ultimately be the optimal kind of like business model for that? And are there any other metrics or parameters that need to be figured out to, you know, really make an Outsic car? It really depends on the

product itself. So like a Maverick's a ticket to a game, right? We don't want, we want the people who bought the ticket to go to the game. There's no real great value to us to have resale. know, we want fans coming in that are really excited and that are MAVS fans. We don't want them to sell to the fans of the opposing team.

You know, and what happens a lot is, and this happens to every team, a MAVS fan will buy a season ticket, but they'll talk to a Golden State Warrior fan and say, you know what, this is a really in-demand game. I'm going to sell it at a huge premium. And what ends up happening is that Golden State Warrior fan comes to a game and cheers for the Warriors, right? And so we don't want that to happen. So for the resale market, it wouldn't be inconceivable that for our highest demand games,

we ask for 75% of the resale because that will disincent people from reselling. And if they decide they just want to make that 25%, great, we'll take our 75%. And the low demand games, then we might only take 10%. Because, you know what, there's not a lot of fans of this particular team, and we just want people to come to the game. and so we'll use a different algorithm to determine what our royalty is going to be. And it really, you know, for a concert, it really doesn't matter who shows up. And so, you know, but it's going to be a fan.

So if it's a high demand concert, you might ask for 50%. Because you don't want that, you know, you want fans buying it. And by definition is probably only going to be a fan and you want them showing up. And you don't want the resellers to get involved in it either. And this applies to the Mavs as well, because there's, you know, there's a whole secondary market business where brokers come in, try to buy up all the tickets, and then resell them and make a markup from the retail to what the supply and demand, that's the pricing app. And so I could see for a concert at the American Airlines Center

in partnership with Live Nation or AET or whoever, we set the royalty at 75% with half of that going to the artist and have that going to us or depending on whatever we can actually set, because we don't want brokers to act as intermediaries. We want fans to get access to the tickets. Yeah, I now understand better because I was, you know, as a creator myself who keeps looking at the NFT space, wondering how I'm going to take advantage of this. I was like, well, what would I set the royalties at?

It really depends. So, like, you know, look at, oh, cliffstones. Oh, my God, I'm spacing. Clifference, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so like Cliff Notes, right? You buy them for your class or a textbook, right? You buy them for your class and then you don't need them anymore. It's perishable.

And so if you're the publisher of Cliff Notes or you create your own, you know, you're an entrepreneurial kid and you create your own clip notes for your class and the class stays the same for year to year to year for the most part, you know, you want to set the royalties relatively low because you want people to be able to sell it over and over again. And that creates a perpetual royalty stream. So if Laura is doing a guide to crypto, and it's an introductory guide, video guide to crypto, and you know that once somebody watches it the first time, you know, they're not going to need to watch it two or three times, and there's no really reason for them to keep it forever, right?

And if it's just a traditional YouTube video, they would just watch it and go on and you would try to sell the ads. Well, you yank it off a YouTube, you put it on your own NFT tube, right? And you sell it for $4.95 or $2.95 on a, you know, a low transaction feed blockchain, and then you can take your 10% royalty. And if you're making 50 cents each, you know, because it's, you know, because, you know, Mark bought it. Mark's got three friends that, you know, he really should, think should watch this.

And I sent him an email because I posted it on lazy.com. And there's an easy way to send it to my friends to buy it. And they buy it. And then their friends do the same thing and it has its own little viral impact. You know, perishable content like that, perishable meaning that, you know, you just need to watch it or read it once or twice, and then you don't have any need for it. Those types of things will have low royalties, but if you get the right marketing angle,

can be sold again and again and again. Yeah, I love how you describe how really unsexy industries can be transformed by NFTs. And I just wondered, are there any others that you kind of have your eye on that you think would be good to be confronted? Yeah, docu-sign, I mentioned, right? So anything documentation-driven, where it's driven by if this thing, than that rules. You know, anything that you can boil down to a very simple, if this than that,

you can put in a smart contract. And if you can put it in a smart contract, you can destabilize the incumbents, you know, and make it a lot easier. When you say if this and that, can you give an example? I'm not sure what you're saying. Well, using like the example for the insurance that I did before, or no, or better yet, you know, a ticket. If the event's over, then you, you know, there's no additional features that are made available. If the event hasn't, happened yet, then you might get access to a pick, you know, an NFT that's minted during a MAVS game, right? And so you could, so, you know, I can put, I can have an Oracle that shows the time, right? And so let's just say that, you know, you buy a ticket to a game and part of the unlocked thing that

happens, there's content or features that are unlocked the minute the game starts. So we have an Oracle that we read that shows that this Dallas Mavericks game is played and started and you have this NFT in your wallet and we're able to say okay here's the highlights from the first quarter of the MAZ game and we mint them and send them to all the wallets that have that are at the game and then now all of a sudden you've got these additional NFTs that you can keep or sell or do whatever you want with and then once the game is over if the game is over then we stop sending it to you and now you have these things in the wallet And now we might make it a different type of collectible where we send you just one single

NFT that shows the score of the game, you know, a box score of the game, whatever it may be that's minted as a memorial collectible that you're able to keep herself from there. I love it. You also talked about fireside chats, which is like a clubhouse chat that's turned into an NFT and sold for five to ten bucks. And it just made me think that how much, like how much a man do you expect there would be for such things? because in the end, then, wouldn't people end up with a lot of basically kind of worthless entities lying around, or is that just what you think the future will look like?

No, it's like how many books, how many, how many MP3 files do you have on your phone, right? Or how do you used to have right before streaming? Right? How many pictures do you have on your phone? Look, one of the worst days in a person's life sometimes is having to figure out what to delete from the phone because they ran out of storage. You know, the point being that we value digital things a lot more than we realize right now. How many books do you have in your bookcase?

Right? One of the reason, you know, some of us like to read physical books, but I've become more of a Kindle type person, you know, and maybe there's a way to attack Amazon by making, because you can buy and resell your books on Amazon, but it's very centralized, Kindle books. Kindle files for resale are available, but it's very centralized. There's no reason that an author,

so if you're self-published and you want to put your book out there, and you can do it as an NNN, and allow it for resale, et cetera, there's no limit, right? Particularly if it's just, you know, an NFT that you have in a wallet, and you can have an unlimited number of wallets, and you have a wallet for books, you have a wallet for pictures, you have a wallet for music, you have a wallet for tickets, you have a wallet for business applications, you have a wallet for textbooks, you have a wallet for whatever that comes along, right?

Family momentos, right, special dates in my life, whatever it makes. may be, and you just create a unique wallet for each one. So there's no place where it seems cluttered. And as long as IPFS and the different storage hubs for this all, you know, sustain themselves, then it doesn't take a lot of space. And even if it moves to the point where there are blockchains that specialize, like the zero knowledge, the ZK type stuff, where it's just one single file size, and I don't know how much media they can store there, but where it's just all compressed to significantly kind of like

zip for blockchain, then all of a sudden that makes it even safer and makes it even more sustainable if you have that choice either to store it locally or store it remotely. And you've talked about how community is everything for businesses or, you know, for anything to succeed. And yet in the bankless podcast, it seemed that you were cautioning celebrities or athletes or creators from doing social tokens around themselves. And I wondered, Why? Yeah, because it's all about expectations, because your community is important to you. The last thing you want to do as a celebrity or somebody with the following is to create an expectation that with my token, you can make money and then not deliver. So I don't want to mark Cuban token that one day

is worth a thousand dollars and the next day is worth a penny because then my brand effectively is telling me that I'm worth of, you know, the community is telling me my brand is worth a penny. And I don't know what external forces have caused that to happen. And, you know, it could well be that, you know, somebody bought a bunch and they just sold it all and just because they don't like me. There's just so many things that can happen when these are treated as asset classes. Now, if there's no value to it and you say they can't be traded and it's just a verification token, that's different. All right. So last question, you've talked a lot about how the Internet Revolution had to do with physical developments like laying down fiber.

And now that that infrastructure is built, I wondered how you imagine that that will change. the development of crypto, will it just be much faster? Or, you know, how do you think that will affect? Crypto really isn't limited by speed. You know, the early days of the internet bandwidth was everything. You know, trying to stream. When we first got started, you know, and it's an interesting comparison in terms of complexity. When we started streaming at AudioNet, you had to have a PC, you know, there was no, you know, maybe a laptop, the laptops were enormous. You had to have a 56K modem. You had to have a TCIP client. You had to have a dial into your internet provider.

You had to have a media player. And then you had to go to the website, which had its own level of complexity in order for the other side. And so those comparable level complexities exist now. But we had the inhibitor of bandwidth. I couldn't show you a movie, you know, on a full screen unless you had multiple megabits of bandwidth with hardly anybody had, even in corporations. Now there's not really a bandwidth limiter, there's not a processing speed limiter. There's only a performance limiter or delimiter on the side of the provider of the blockchain itself.

So I don't think technology is an issue. Until we get to quantum, then you have to start thinking about, you know, what can be hacked. And that's not a question for today, but that's a question for the future. All right. Well, this has been super fun. Where can people learn more about you and your work? You can go to markcubin.com. You can see all the companies that I've invested in, including all the blockchain stuff.

You can see my NFT collection at lazy.com slash mcubin. And you can hear me this on Shark Tank Friday nights on ABC. I'll be the one talking about blockchain and all this kind of stuff and asking companies what their crypto solutions are going to be. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Lars. Great, great interview.

Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about. Mark, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with all from Anthony You, Daniel Ness, and Mark Murdoch. Thanks for listening.