By
Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
February 8th, 2024
A well-known American businessman is about to participate in his first initial coin offering, just a few weeks after calling the digital currency “a bubble.”
Mark Cuban has unveiled plans to acquire digital tokens as part of the crowdsale that will be launched by an eSports betting platform called Unikrn. It seems like the businessman no longer considers the digital currency to be as bad as he earlier thought.
In early June, Cuban said via a post on his Twitter account that bitcoin was a bubble, what provoked a significant price decrease. As he then wrote, the slump only proved that bitcoin was in the bubble territory. However, the value of the virtual currency returned to the same level it had been before Cuban’s comments and even grew higher.
According to the investor, the sector of online gambling is rapidly growing and it is the best time to start an ICO campaign.
Introduced in 2015, Unikrn is already part of Cuban’s investment portfolio. Together with a group of other investors, such as 500 Startups, Ashton Kutcher, and Elisabeth Murdoch, the entrepreneur invested $7 million into the service. The funding brought the company’s total investment from $3 million to $10 million.
The Seattle-based startup allows users to place bets on eSports matches and tournaments for games like DOTA 2, League of Legends, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Unikrn is going to issue a total of 1 billion tokens that are called Unikoin Gold. The start of the crowdsale is scheduled for the end of the August.
In May, billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper announced that he would take part in his first initial coin offering (ICO) for a decentralized blockchain platform Tezos. He became the first high-profile investor to participate in this type of funding.
Mark Cuban is a famous entrepreneur known as the owner of an NBA Champion Dallas Mavericks and one of ABC’s “Sharks” on the hit show Shark Tank. The businessman, who is almost 60, never stops learning, what probably explains his success. As he recently told CNBC, a life-long learning is the best skill.
Instead of just sitting back, Cuban spends his spare time reading books on computer programming and artificial intelligence. He recently took a Python class on his mobile phone and is currently reading a book on machine learning.
The businessman is also excited about the potential of the artificial intelligence and is convinced that the world’s first trillionaire will be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur. As he said, we will observe more technological advances in the next 10 years than we have within the past 30 years.
“Whatever you are studying right now if you are not getting up to speed on deep learning, neural networks, etc., you lose. We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation,” he said.