Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban confirmed this morning that the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team owned by Cuban, will be accepting cryptocurrency payments “Next season.” The news came as a seemingly off-the-cuff reply to a question posed by one of Cuban’s Twitter followers. Cuban, who is no stranger to cryptocurrency technology, later confirmed the news to CoinDesk.
“We will be adding a crypto payment ability for next season,” Cuban said. “We will accept BTC, ETH, possibly some other currencies. [That’s] to be determined.”
While interesting, it should be noted that no other details about the plan have been released. Cuban declined to go into detail about the initiative with CoinDesk, but did tell the website that his team was “looking at” accepting additional tokens from companies that “we have traditional business relationships with” as a means of expanding their customer base. This could mean that Cuban’s company is considering accepting select ICO tokens through their payment portal.
Although best known these days for his role as a reality-show venture capitalist on the ABC show Shark Tank, Cuban has a long track record of being ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. He played a vital role in the early days of streaming media, for instance, eventually selling Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock in 1999. As a VC and angel investor, Cuban has paid particular attention to blockchain startups, substantially funding projects like crypto-investment firm 1confirmation. Another Cuban-backed project, e-sports betting startup Unikrn, recently completed a $31 million ICO.
Ironically, Cuban has been publicly skeptical of bitcoin in the past. As recently as June of 2017, Cuban claimed that bitcoin was “in a bubble,” and added “I just don’t know when or how much it corrects.” His tweet about the “bubble” may even have caused BTC’s price to crash from a then-all-time-high of $2,967. Cuban has since admitted to owning both BTC and ETH, although the size of his personal cryptocurrency investments hasn’t been revealed.
