Briefly
- Millionaire NBA team owner Mark Cuban has been unable to get enough of NFTs lately.
- He told Decrypt that the key to understanding the NFT craze was to “overcome the perception that I should be able to physically touch it.”
The owner of Dallas Mavericks and the investor, Mark Cuban, of ABC, ‘Shark Tank’, had never tweeted the term ‘NFT’ until January 27 this year. But since then, he has tweeted a cascade of links to his own NFTs or non-fungible characters, blockchain-based collectibles that have exploded in popularity (and price) in sports, music and the arts.
Cuban made up for it: he promotes NFTs on NBA Top Shot, Rarible, Mintable and OpenSea, different platforms for you to buy, trade and share NFT’s.
It’s a difficult phenomenon to turn your head around.
Cuban, in an extensive interview this week with Decipher, explains this by holding his own favorite basketball card: John Brisker, who played for the Cuban hometown of Pittsburgh Condors in the ABA in the 1970s before leaving the league to become a mercenary in Uganda, where he disappeared in 1978. (‘Cool as hell story’, “says Cuban.)
The fun of owning the card is ‘just the joy of ownership’, Cuban says. “I do not take it out and look at it all the time. The picture of John Brisker, you can find it online somewhere, there is nothing unique, and it is not as if the picture is a work of art, and there is nothing special about it. statistics and the comments on the back. Everything that is available online. It’s the ownership that goes with it. And by having it physically, it’s your only proof of ownership. “
The ‘joy of ownership’
If a Cuban wants to sell the card, he will have to embark on an intensive process: getting it valued, rated and priced by a professional, packing it, sending it to the buyer and then receiving his payment.
Enter the NBA Top Shot, the market in which fans and collectors buy digital video clips of, say, a LeBron James dunk and share, hold or sell them. In the last 30 days, almost $ 300 million has been done in volume. On a particularly wild day in February, the platform sold $ 2.6 million to NFTs within 30 minutes. Collectors in some cases pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a digital video clip of a play that you can also watch on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.
You need to ‘overcome the perception that I should be able to physically touch it,’ says Cuban, ‘and realize that it is more effort; the joy of ownership is really important. You get all the benefits of the joy of ownership. .. all the value creation – or loss, for that matter – the frictionless trading and transactions, the ability to pay royalties to the original creator after each sale, which is huge, and which really enables more creativity to go to the market come. Whoever designed it [the card of] good old John Brisker and taking his picture get no value at all. ‘
This is easier said than done to physically overcome the feeling of the art you have bought, although someone who believes in Bitcoin as an investment has at least in part already come up with the idea of the Internet of value.
And even if you buy the Cuban pitch for NFTs, the technology can be intimidating. NBA Top Shot is on Flow, a faster blockchain than Ethereum, and allow buyers to pay in dollars so they do not necessarily have to deal with crypto or even think of crypto. (Top Shot has another thorny issue at the moment: buyers have complained that it’s hard to get your money off the platform.)
But the Cuban assertion about the possibilities of paying royalties to the original owner is the part that gripped artists. The fact that Kings of Leon have turned their new album into three NFT varieties may well indicate that something is permanent here.
‘Not as private as people think’
There is another ripple with NFT ownership. If you publish a link to your NFT wallet on a platform like Rarible, anyone with a basic understanding of blockchain can see the wallet address on Etherscan (a public website for the Ethereum blockchain) and the monetary content of see your wallet. . (The Bitcoin blockchain is the same: as anonymous, but actually more as semi-anonymous.)
Cuban likes to tweet its Rarible wallet, and as of Friday afternoon, the wallet contains $ 455,000 worth of tokens and NFTs.
Cuban knows that everyone can see it, and he does not care. (He also hints: “I have a lot of wallets. I have a lot of wallets.”) But does a celebrity like Lindsay Lohan realize who also tweeted her Rarible address? (She only has $ 440 now.)
“Yes, it’s not as private as people think,” Cuban admits laughing. “And that’s the whole point of the blockchain, isn ‘t it? That it’s 100% public, because it’s all verifiable. But of course, I can take it all out and put it in another wallet … And for me, 99% of what I’m just learning now is learning how pricing mechanisms work, learning how transfer technology works, learning how to coin, learning how to place, all of these things are part of a learning curve, because it needs to get simpler. should be easier so that someone can do it, or not. ‘