Billionaire investor and “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban said the “insane” amount of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) currently under development is unsustainable.
At a panel at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, Cuba compared the current NFT epidemic to the dot-com bubble when someone launches a website to raise money.
“I was in the early days of the internet and it was insane,” he said. “This is very similar to what is happening with cryptography, especially NFTs.”
“Everyone has an NFT for their siblings and it’s hard to tell the difference between signal and noise,” Cuba said, adding that the NFT market has peaked in “supersonic time.”
During the dot-com rush, “the project was popping up like an NFT now,” he said. “Does anyone think they are sustainable and long lasting? … number.”
This does not mean that some NFTs will not survive. He pointed out Amazon and eBay as prosperous companies following the dot-com crash.
Participatory entertainment
Cuba also talked about a startup called Fireside that he supports. He believes this is where entertainment is heading.
The future of entertainment will be interactive rather than one-way. For example, when people create podcasts, they don’t know how the audience reacts to their messages. This can be difficult for creators who rely on podcasts to make a living.
Falon Fatemi, CEO of Fireside, who also participated in the panel, said her startup allows creators to “feel the viewer virtually” when the viewer applauds or reacts to the content. He said he invented the technology. “This allows viewers to participate in content creation.”
Cuba added that such interactivity changes the overall dynamics of content creation. “It’s important to find a new way to connect, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Fireside celebrities include Cubans, Jay Leno, and the late Bob Saget.
Web3.0 is more than technology
Asked how destructive Web 3.0 is, Cuba said that the technical side of Web 3.0 is “easy. The hard part is staying involved.”
For example, people buying real estate in the Metaverse need to worry about the development of the community, he said.
What makes real estate valuable? “Place, place, place,” Cuba said. Why is location important? There are people there. In order for the Metaverse to be “real,” we need to foster a community.
Otherwise, he said, the money spent buying Metaverse real estate would be lost, especially because there are “barriers to entry” in creating virtual worlds. “You put 6 people in a Zoom or VR channel-that’s your metaverse.”
One of the nice things about distributed Web 3.0 is that content creators ultimately get paid for the value of their work.
People don’t have to rely on technology platforms if they can share content peer-to-peer. It also improves the ability of creators to receive multiple payments.
For example, a poet writes and sells poetry. If the buyer resells the poem to someone else, the original author will also be rewarded.
When this happened, Cuba said the poet could lower the initial price of the poem because he or she would continue to be compensated when the content changed.
He said today’s mega-social media platforms are the gatekeeper of content. On the decentralized web, “It’s hard to be a gatekeeper in the crypto world. That’s good.”
This article was first published in AI Business, a sister magazine of IoT World Today.
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