Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban has dramatically reduced his Bitcoin holdings, citing the flagship cryptocurrency’s failure to act as a reliable store of value and macro hedge against economic turbulence.
Cuban expressed deep disappointment in Bitcoin’s recent price action compared to traditional safe-haven assets.
“Bitcoin has lost the plot. I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold,” Cuban stated. “Well, gold just blew up, Bitcoin dropped. Not the hedge I expected it to be.”
Billionaire Cuban Sells Most of His Bitcoin (BTC)
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In addition to revealing that he sold the vast majority of his Bitcoin, the former Dallas Mavericks majority owner also took aim at the broader speculative market, bluntly dismissing memecoins as “garbage.”
Early skepticism
Cuban’s history with crypto began with intense skepticism. For years, he was one of Bitcoin’s most vocal traditional finance critics. In a famous 2019 interview, he stated that he would “rather have bananas” than Bitcoin because bananas have intrinsic value (you can at least eat them).
He frequently argued that Bitcoin was too difficult to use, lacked fundamental utility, and was purely driven by speculative mania rather than underlying technological value.
Cuban’s stance changed dramatically during the pandemic-era crypto bull run. As decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) exploded into the mainstream, Cuban became fascinated by the underlying technology.
He heavily favored Ethereum over Bitcoin, arguing that Ethereum’s ability to host decentralized applications gave it actual utility and made it the closest thing to a “true currency.”
Cuban began heavily investing in the space, taking stakes in projects like Polygon (MATIC), NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Mintable, and various DeFi protocols.
Interestingly, his recent dismissal of memecoins as “garbage” represents a stark reversal from his 2021 behavior. During the height of the memecoin craze, Cuban became a prominent champion of Dogecoin. He famously announced that the Dallas Mavericks would accept DOGE for tickets and merchandise, arguing at the time that the memecoin actually had unique utility as a medium of exchange because its low price and inflation rate encouraged people to spend it rather than hoard it.