Will Mark Cuban eat his words with his newest crypto prediction?
On Saturday afternoon, Mark Cuban posted another crypto prediction, “Chips as an asset class will be the new crypto.” Within a day, the controversial, 10-word thesis became a trending topic and racked up over 1.2 million views.
The replies doubled as a highlight reel of Cuban’s dismal record with prior crypto predictions.
Cuban has been incorrectly predicting crypto prices for more than seven years, including a banana-based valuation framework and numerous deleted posts that are doubly embarrassing after Cuban both failed to predict crypto prices and then tried to erase the evidence.
Cuban also promoted an Iron Finance yield farm mere days before it imploded and went to $0, plus a “risk free” lender that went bankrupt.
He has also experienced a six-figure phishing loss of digital assets due to poor security and self-owned by selling out of his bitcoin (BTC) position.
Before anyone weighs in on Cuban’s belief that computer chips will outperform crypto, below is a review of his expired predictions.
‘I’d rather have bananas’
In a 2019 Wired interview, Cuban said BTC had even less intrinsic value than baseball cards, comic books, or artwork.
Confidently, he delivered a line that still haunts him, “I’d rather have bananas, I can eat bananas. Crypto, not so much.”
Weeks later, he doubled down, telling Forbes’ audience that BTC had “no chance” of becoming a reliable currency.
Since Cuban’s September 27, 2019 bearish opinion, the price of BTC has rallied 670%. BTC was trading near $8,200 at the time of Cuban’s “no chance” call.
Deleting his comparison of crypto to dot-com
By January 2021, Cuban was comparing crypto trading to the dot-com stock trading bubble of the late 1990s.
That post has since vanished from his account.
A few months after he deleted that post, in an October 2021 social audio space on Twitter, Cuban called BTC “the best store of value” and said he actually owned it.
Read more: Serial crypto failure Mark Cuban says he’s in it for the apps
Mark Cuban’s 206% yield farm went to $0
Cuban’s confusing about-face and attempts to make amends with the BTC community in October 2021, above, makes more sense in light of his June 2021 comments.
That summer, Cuban was a crypto yield farmer. He blogged (archive) about earning “an annualized return of about 206%” as a liquidity provider in a DAI/TITAN pool.
DAI was a stablecoin by MakerDAO, and TITAN was an Iron Finance token. Days later, TITAN fell from around $64 to $0.
Mortified, Cuban deleted his blog post.
Iron Finance itself described the wipeout as a bank run. The project never recovered.
Cuban admitted in another since-deleted post that he got hit like everybody else. He then told Bloomberg, “Even though I got rugged on this, it’s really on me for being lazy” by email.
Voyager Digital wasn’t ‘risk free’
Undeterred, Cuban’s basketball team the Dallas Mavericks signed Voyager Digital that October as their first crypto sponsor. Voyager spent north of $25 million on the five-year deal.
Cuban called Voyager’s yields “as close to risk free as you’re going to get in the crypto universe” while promoting the platform.
Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July 2022, and a class action soon accused Cuban of helping promote its alleged Ponzi scheme.
A Florida judge dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds last December. Investors asked an appeals court to revive it in June.
Pumping DOGE repeatedly
Cuban’s Mavericks became the first NBA team to accept Dogecoin (DOGE) payments in March 2021. Cuban exclaimed the launch as the price of DOGE pumped 20% that day.
On August 15 of that year, he further effused, “DOGE’s imperfections and simplicity are it’s [sic] greatest strengths,” coinciding with another 18% single-day rally in DOGE.
Eventually, trying to downplay his prior months of promotion, he disclosed a mere “$494” worth of personal DOGE holdings by August 17, 2021.
Couldn’t even keep his Metamask safe
In September 2023, a phishing attack drained around $870,000 from one of Cuban’s crypto wallets.
He admitted the loss was due to him downloading compromised MetaMask software.
Protos reported at the time that he saved a further $2.5 million only by contacting Coinbase before the attacker did.
Add this not-so-luminous example to the list of Cuban’s dubious crypto actions.
Selling out entirely
Then came his capitulation. This May, Cuban claimed, “Bitcoin has lost the plot.” BTC, he lamented, should have been but was not outperforming gold’s then-recent rally.
When bitcoiners dogpiled into the comment section, he boasted about alleged sales at higher prices. “My lowest sales price was 88k. Started in the 120s,” he claimed.
A fuller disclosure emerged this month in an interview from Paris’ RAISE Summit. Cuban said he had sold “98%” of a BTC position once worth “hundreds of millions.” The small DOGE position, he said, he kept.
BTC was trading near $63,000 this weekend. That is well below the $88,000 bottom of Cuban’s exit range, if his autobiographical version of events is actually true. After seven years of bananas, rug pulls, and bankrupcies, the crypto trade that worked out for Cuban was his exit.
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