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 part is that people are buying real estate in these places,” Cuban told YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this week. “That’s just the dumbest shit ever.”
Cuban, who is one of the stars of the investing show “Shark Tank” and also owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, is referring to companies like 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 3-D decentralized version of the internet — in many instances the metaverse may be partially powered by blockchain technology.
Celebrities like rapper Snoop Dogg, and reality TV star Paris Hilton, as well as companies like Gucci, Atari 0KUV, -1.29% and HSBC HSBC, -0.57%, have already purchased virtual land in the metaverse — a plot of virtual real estate next to Snoop Dogg’s in Sandbox reportedly sold for $ 458,000 in December 2021.
But “right now it’s more talk than anything,” 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 discontinued), has been an advocate in the crypto and NFT space in recent years.
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The Dallas Mavericks owner is invested in the crypto and NFT space and claims to own several thousand dollars worth of bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.24%, ethereum ETHUSD, +7.31% and dogecoin DOGEUSD, +1.54%, according to a CNBC report, and also says that 80% of his investments that aren’t on Shark Tank are crypto-centric.
Generally, Web3 or Web 3.0 depicts a decentralized internet platform that runs on public blockchain technology, as opposed to Web 2.0 which is mostly run through large centralized conglomerates like Google GOOG, +2.67% GOOGL, +2.62% and Facebook META, +5.60%.
The metaverse could become an $ 800 billion market by 2024 as brands like Meta, Google, Microsoft MSFT, +2.18% and Apple AAPL, +2.37% investing in some form in the metaverse, according to Bloomberg.
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The metaverse real-estate market is expected to grow by $ 5.37 billion between 2021 to 2026, according to a report from Technavio, a global technology research and advisory company.