Mark Cuban’s new ‘chips are the new crypto’ call revives a seven-year record of misses

Mark Cuban has set off another round of crypto debate. Last Saturday afternoon, he posted that "chips as an asset class will become the new cryptocurrency," a short line that quickly went viral and drew more than 1.2 million views in a day. The comment immediately revived attention on his seven-year record of crypto calls, many of which ended badly or were later walked back. In 2019, Cuban told Wired that Bitcoin had less intrinsic value than baseball cards, comic books or art. He added: "I’d rather have bananas. At least you can eat bananas. Crypto? You can’t." A few weeks later, he told Forbes that Bitcoin had "no chance" of becoming a reliable currency. At the time, on Sept. 27, 2019, Bitcoin was around $8,200; since then, the article says, it has risen 670%. By May this year, Cuban had changed his tone again, saying Bitcoin had "lost its way." He also said he had started selling in the $120,000 range and had sold at a minimum price of $88,000. In an interview at the RAISE summit in Paris this month, he said he had sold 98% of a Bitcoin position that was once worth hundreds of millions of dollars and kept only a small amount of Dogecoin. His crypto history includes more than Bitcoin. In January 2021, he posted that crypto trading looked like the late-1990s internet stock bubble, then deleted the post. Months later, in a Twitter Spaces session, he reversed course and called Bitcoin the "best store of value," saying he owned Bitcoin. That summer, Cuban moved into liquidity mining. He wrote on his blog that as a liquidity provider for the DAI/TITAN pair, he was earning an annualized 206%. DAI is a stablecoin issued by MakerDAO, while TITAN was the governance token of Iron Finance. Within days, TITAN fell from about $64 to nearly zero, and Cuban deleted the blog post. Iron Finance described the collapse as a mass bank run, and the project never recovered. Cuban later said in a deleted post that he, like other investors, had suffered losses. He then told Bloomberg by email: "While I got rugged, bottom line is I was careless." He did not stop there. In October 2021, the Dallas Mavericks announced Voyager Digital as the team’s first crypto sponsor under a five-year deal worth more than $25 million. While promoting the platform, Cuban said Voyager’s yield was "the closest thing to risk free in crypto." Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July 2022, and investors later sued, accusing Cuban of helping promote what they called a Ponzi-like platform. A Florida court dismissed the case last December on jurisdiction grounds, and investors asked an appeals court in June to revive it. Dogecoin also got the Cuban treatment. In March 2021, the Mavericks became the first NBA team to accept DOGE for payment, and Dogecoin jumped 20% that day. On Aug. 15 that same year, Cuban wrote that Dogecoin’s flaws and simplicity were its biggest strengths, and DOGE rose another 18% in a single day. Two days later, he downplayed the campaign and said he personally held only $494 worth of Dogecoin. Cuban’s security habits have also been questioned. In September 2023, one of his crypto wallets was drained in a phishing attack, costing about $870,000. He said he had downloaded a tampered MetaMask installer. Reports at the time said he contacted Coinbase in time to stop another $2.5 million from being moved by hackers. Against that backdrop, Cuban’s latest chips remark is not just another hot take. It lands inside a long record of public bets, deleted posts, failed projects and sharp reversals that the crypto market has already had years to judge.