In brief
- Mark Cuban has invested in popular NFT aggregator site CryptoSlam.
- The amount he put in hasn’t been disclosed.
- Cuban’s pretty bullish on NFTs.
Billionaire Shark Tank star, Dallas Mavericks owner, and high-profile crypto fan Mark Cuban has invested in an NFT data aggregator service called CryptoSlam through his venture capital company, Radical Investments.
CryptoSlam started life in 2018 in Austin, Texas, when digital collectibles fan Randy Wasinger launched the site to track Major League Baseball Champions collectibles. Wasinger has since built the site into one of the biggest NFT aggregators on the web, tracking trading metrics from over 50 different NFT projects, including NBA Top Shot, NFT fantasy soccer game Sorare and art project Cryptopunks.
In an announcement on CryptoSlam’s Medium page, Cuban said CryptoSlam is “the industry leader in tracking transactions for NFTs,” and that its dominance “is only growing.” He added: “I’m excited to be part of the amazing company Randy is putting together.”
A Brief Primer on NFTs
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are digital collectibles and artworks bought and sold on blockchains, mostly Ethereum.
The most valuable NFT token commanded a price of $69.3 million, even though any Tom, Dick, or Harry could right click the image and press ‘Save As’. Why? Blockchain’s solution is no less mystifying, but it’s ingenious.
At the core of blockchain tech is a really sturdy database. To change any value in this database, you need to commandeer 51% of the computing power of the network. Considering Ethereum is a global network, made up of many thousands of computers, this in itself is nigh impossible.
An NFT is a smart contract on this blockchain; specifically, a token that usually adheres to the ERC-721 standard, a template of rules governing the minting of NFTs on Ethereum. Smart contracts are self-enforcing financial contracts. Here comes the leap: thanks to blockchain, you can specify the scarcity of any image or collectible you’ve made, whether it’s one of a kind, two of a kind—whatever you desire. These NFTs can then be traded on online auction houses, usually in exchange for Ethereum.
So you’re not buying the digital image in all its infinitely reproducible glory, nor the rights to the image itself; you’re buying the token of the image, or essentially bragging rights for you to say, “I supported this artist/NFT creator by buying their work and you can see this fact of ownership forever imprinted on Etherscan. Ha!”
Mark Cuban and NFTs go way back
Mark Cuban, both a crypto fan and the owner of a basketball team, is more bullish on NFTs than most.
CryptoSlam is not Cuban’s first investment in the NFT world. At the end of March it was announced that he was one of several contributors in a $9 million investment round for NFT marketplace SuperRare. And earlier this month, Cuban revealed that he’s throwing his support behind Nifty’s, an upcoming social media startup which aims to connect people through their love of NFTs.
You heard it here first. Mark Cuban is crazy about NFTs.