In brief

  • Billionaire investor Mark Cuban will invest and advise dClimate, a data marketplace.
  • The project uses both Ethereum and Chainlink to work.
  • It isn’t the first Ethereum-based project Cuban is interested in.

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban is investing in and advising Ethereum-based data project dClimate. 

The Dallas Mavericks owner will be a strategic advisor to the company, according to an announcement today. dClimate, a decentralized network for climate data which uses Ethereum as its base layer and relies heavily on oracle network Chainlink to function, declined to tell Decrypt how much Cuban would invest. 

The move shows the tech entrepreneur’s growing interest in Ethereum. Cuban previously said that Ethereum will disrupt software companies, banking and healthcare.

“I could see just disrupting the fuck out of them [SaaS (software as a service) companies],” he told Decrypt in an exclusive March interview. 

He also said last month that Ethereum has “greater long term value” than Bitcoin. Shortly after, he invested an undisclosed amount in Polygon, an Ethereum scalability startup. 

Now, his latest Ethereum-related investment is targeting another big industry that may be ripe for disrupting: data. 

dClimate works to provide businesses and entities with climate data. It provides a data marketplace for anyone from farmers to governments who need information about the climate so they can build projects or plan for future disasters. It relies on blockchain to cut out the middlemen and connect buyers and sellers of such data directly.

And it uses Chainlink—a project built on Ethereum that gets information in and out of a blockchain—to retrieve that data. Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that aims to connect blockchains with real-world data in a trustless and reliable way. The network's growth surged last year, benefiting from hundreds of partnerships and integrations with crypto projects and resulting in a 1000% increase in the value of its native LINK token.

Sid Jha, a founding partner of dClimate, told Decrypt that “there are few people who uniquely understand the way Mark does how blockchain and smart contracts can help revolutionize and bring transparency and efficiency to industries like climate data.” 

He added: “His insights and expertise will be an invaluable asset to the dClimate team as we build a platform that can be leveraged by the many stakeholders who need reliable and secure weather data to build climate resilience.”

Cuban isn’t just involved in Ethereum though. The investor has also said Dogecoin (a cryptocurrency initially invented as a joke but now has a market cap of over $40.7 billion) has value. And his Dallas Mavericks started accepting Bitcoin for payment two years ago.