In brief
- Crypto payments company BitPay has added support for Dogecoin.
- Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks is the first merchant to start accepting DOGE.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is all in on crypto, making the media rounds for the past few weeks to talk up Ethereum, NFT collecting, and the myriad possibilities for smart contracts to disrupt software, insurance claims, and even NBA ticketing.
Now the franchise, which was the second NBA team to start accepting Bitcoin as payment a few years ago, has partnered with BitPay to accept Dogecoin (DOGE) as payment for tickets and merchandise.
Dogecoin is a meme-based cryptocurrency that has soared recently in value thanks to social media mentions, fueled especially by Elon Musk tweets. Crypto payments firm BitPay just added Dogecoin to its list of supported coins today, and the Mavs are the first merchant to sign on to accept it as payment. But why?
"Because we can," said Cuban in a press release on Thursday. "We have chosen to do so because sometimes in business you have to do things that are fun, engaging, and hopefully generate a lot of PR. So we will take Dogecoin, today, tomorrow and possibly forever more. For those of you who would like to learn more about Dogecoin we strongly encourage you to talk to your teenagers who are on TikTok and ask them about it."
If you can't tell: Cuban is having a lot of fun with crypto.
But will anyone actually pay the Mavs in Dogecoin?
Not if the recent past is any indication.
In an extensive interview with Decrypt earlier this week, Cuban admitted: "We actually took our first Bitcoin five or six years ago, only nobody bought anything [in Bitcoin], and the only reason I did it was to prove a point that no one's going to buy anything. And then we did it again a couple years ago, and we sold $314 worth at whatever Bitcoin was at the time. Again, somebody was just trying to prove a point that they would buy something, and I was trying to prove a point that not many people would."
And right now, as many cryptocurrencies surge in value, no one is clamoring to spend them anyway. That could prove a fascinating contradiction as companies like PayPal and Tesla plan to let customers pay in crypto: Will anyone want to?
Besides, as Cuban added to Decrypt, "As long as you're converting to fiat, you're not really spending in crypto anyway."