Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he sold most of his bitcoins holdings after losing confidence in cryptocurrency’s role as a hedge against weakening fiat currencies and geopolitical instability.
Cuban, whose net worth is around $10 billion, said Bitcoin’s price behavior during the recent Iranian conflict called into question one of the main reasons he owned the asset during an episode of the sports podcast “Portfolio Players,” where he primarily discussed professional sports and his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks.
“When all this bullshit hit the fans with the war in Iran, bitcoin was always the best alternative to fiat currency losing its value and I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold. Well, gold just exploded…bitcoin fell. And every time the dollar went down, bitcoin should have gone up…and it just didn’t do that,” Cuban said.
The comments mark a notable shift for Cuba, which for years has publicly championed bitcoin as a superior version of gold due to its fixed supply and decentralized structure.
In a 2021 interview with “The Delphi Podcast,” Cuban said his crypto portfolio consisted of approximately “60% Bitcoin, 30% Ethereum, and 10% the rest.” At the time, he claimed that bitcoin’s scarcity made it a more important store of value than gold and claimed he had “never sold it.”
Cuban also compared blockchain technology and smart contracts to the early days of the internet era, back then, particularly praising Ethereum (ETH) for enabling decentralized financial applications and NFTs.
His latest remarks suggest that enthusiasm has cooled, at least towards bitcoin.
“It’s not the coverage I expected, and it was really disappointing, and so I would say I’m more disappointed with Bitcoin, not as disappointed with Ethereum and the rest… garbage,” Cuban said.
These criticisms come as investors continue to debate Bitcoin’s role in global markets. Proponents often describe the asset as “digital gold” that can protect wealth in times of inflation, geopolitical instability, or weakness in traditional currencies. Yet bitcoin often trades more as a high-risk tech asset, rising and falling alongside investors’ broader appetite for risk.
Gold prices have climbed recently amid heightened geopolitical tensions and concerns over the US-Iran conflict, while bitcoin has struggled to maintain momentum despite a weaker dollar.
Cuban’s comments also reflect a broader divide within crypto markets. While some investors remain focused on bitcoin as a macro hedge, others increasingly see value in blockchain networks such as Ethereum that support tokenized trading, payments and financial applications rather than functioning primarily as stores of value.
