Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and avid crypto enthusiast, is not sold on the meta universe. “The worst thing is that people buy real estate in these places. This is the dumbest thing ever,” he said on the crypto-themed YouTube channel Altcoin Daily over the weekend. From the report: Cuban’s comments come as hype around the metaverse — a term that broadly describes a new virtual world where people can hang out, play and shop — appears to be cooling off. Facebook changed its name to Meta last November, sparking a flurry of excitement about the potential of a metaverse that has spurred a land grab for digital stories on so-called metaverse platforms created by the likes of Sandbox and Decentraland.
These platforms allow investors to buy land as NFTs that can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets such as OpenSea’s NFT exchange. Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung and Adidas have all purchased digital land, a move that Cuban, based on his recent comments, is unlikely to follow. Nor would Cuban believe the central claim of the land speculators of the metaverse that scarcity would make these digital parcels valuable. “It’s not even as good as URL or ENS [Ethereum naming service]because there are unlimited volumes you can create,” he said during an interview on YouTube. Although he is an investor in Yuga Labs, owner of the popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he’s not a fan of Sale’s land, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April. “I still thought it was a stupid thing to do. It was a lot of money for them, you know. , but it wasn’t based on utilities,” he said.
