Cody McGrath 
Mark Cuban said that putting more attention on applications and utility outside of finance would bring more people back to the crypto space and could stop the market from falling.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur best known as one of the major investors on the reality television show Shark Tank, believes the crypto bear market will continue until there is a greater emphasis on applications with utility.
He also believes that the market has not yet reached “cheap” rates.
Cuban has previously indicated that Bitcoin accounts for approximately 80% of his non-Shark Tank holdings. He was asked how long he anticipates the current crypto bear market will persist on a June 23 episode of the Bankless Podcast:
“It lasts until there’s a catalyst and that catalyst is going to be an application, or we get so low people to go ‘fuck it I’ll buy some.”
He believes that a greater emphasis on applications with utility will lift cryptocurrency out of its slump, and with so many apps focused on financial technology or collectibles, the development of a business-oriented app would be one of such occurrences that might cause a market reversal.
Cuban expected a flood of users if something like that appeared, using the example of a “decentralized version of Quickbooks,” a small business accounting management program.
Despite analysts anticipating that Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies have reached a price bottom, Cuban claims that “it’s not cheap yet” when examining the enormous market capitalization of various businesses.
“You look at the market caps, and you see it’s a billion-dollar-plus market cap of $6 billion or $8 billion or $40 billion you don’t look at that and go ‘that’s. If you remember back to DeFi summer, these things were selling for less than a penny and their market caps were in the hundreds of millions.”
He adds that even with lower market size cryptos, “there’s no utility,” and uses the decentralized exchange SushiSwap (SUSHI) token as an example of a “very cheap” investment with a $215 million market value, but adds:
“You get paid it if you’re a liquidity provider, but then who’s going to buy it from you? What’s the reason to buy it from you?”
Cuban believes that mergers of various protocols and blockchains will eventually result in the crypto business consolidating, as “that’s what happens in any industry.”
“I’d rather work with someone who says, ‘Let’s do a roll-up,’” Cuban said, adding that he’d support a merger of several blockchains, close others, and then migrate applications and communities to just one, offering a token exchange or bridge from the other blockchains to ferry users over.
“Now all of a sudden your user base is 10x, you still have a problem of better applications, you still have to have some reason people want to use that blockchain but at least you may be able to have a better community to come up with ideas because otherwise you’re gone.”
Cuban was asked which sub-sectors of the crypto world he was most optimistic about, citing Layer 1’s, Layer 2’s, NFTs, and DeFi tokens.
Cuban expressed particular interest in carbon offset DeFi tokens, which he plans to burn to offset his carbon impact. While not everyone cares about offsetting their carbon footprint, he thinks it is the “easiest approach” in comparison to buying carbon offsets through a broker, which he describes as a “pain in the ass.”
Finally, Cuban stated that “all of them have promise, that’s why they got all this money, and all of them have a reason why they think they’re superior and will succeed.”