Cuban loves crypto and Web3 technology, but thinks buying real estate in the metaverse is a bad idea.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban loves cryptocurrency and Web3 technology, but thinks buying digital real estate in the metaverse is not a good idea.
“The worst thing is that people are buying real estate in these places,” Cuban told YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this week. “It’s just the dumbest piece of shit ever.”
Cuban, who is one of the stars of the investment program “Shark Tank” and also owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, is referring to companies such as Decentraland or The Sandbox where people can invest in virtual land within the metaverse.
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The metaverse in this case refers to a 3D decentralized version of the internet – in many cases the metaverse may be partly powered by blockchain technology.
Celebrities such as rapper Snoop Dogg and reality TV star Paris Hilton, as well as companies such as Gucci, Atari and HSBC, have already bought virtual land in the metaverse – a plot of virtual real estate next to Snoop Dogg’s in the Sandbox reportedly sold for 458,000 dollars in December 2021.
But “right now it’s more talk than anything else,” Cuban said in the interview about the metaverse.
Cuban, who made part of his fortune in the early days of the Internet when he sold his company Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion just before the dot-com bust (Broadcast.com has since been wound up), has been an advocate in the crypto and NFT space for the past few years.
The Dallas Mavericks owner is invested in the crypto and NFT space and claims to own several thousand dollars worth of bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin, according to a CNBC report, and also says 80% of his non-Shark Tank investments are crypto-centric .
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In general, Web3 or Web 3.0 depicts a decentralized internet platform running on public blockchain technology, as opposed to Web 2.0 which is mostly run through large centralized conglomerates such as Google and Facebook.
The metaverse could become an $800 billion market by 2024 as brands like Meta, Google, Microsoft and Apple invest in one form or another in the metaverse, according to Bloomberg.
The metaverse real estate market is expected to grow by $5.37 billion between 2021 and 2026, according to a report by Technavio, a global technology research and advisory company.
This article was published by Dow Jones Newswires
