Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he has sold most of his bitcoin 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 Iran conflict challenged one of the core reasons he owned the asset during an episode of the sports podcast “Portfolio Players,” where he mainly discussed professional sports and his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks.
“When all that crap hit the fan with the Iran war, bitcoin was always the best alternative to fiat currency losing its value, and I’ve always thought it was a better version of gold than gold. Well, gold just blew up…bitcoin went down. And every time the dollar went down, bitcoin should have gone up…and it just didn’t,” Cuban said.
The comments mark a notable shift for Cuban, who for years had publicly defended 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 roughly “60% bitcoin, 30% Ethereum and 10% the rest.” At the time, he argued that bitcoin’s scarcity made it a stronger store of value than gold and said he had “never sold it.”
Cuban also compared blockchain technology and smart contracts to the early Internet era, praising Ethereum (ETH) in particular for enabling decentralized finance applications and NFTs.
His latest remarks suggest that enthusiasm has cooled, at least for bitcoin.
“Not the hedge I expected it to be and it was really disappointing and so I’d say I’m more disappointed with bitcoin, not so disappointed with Ethereum and the rest … garbage,” Cuban said.
The criticism comes as investors continue to debate bitcoin’s role in global markets. Proponents often describe the asset as “digital gold” that can protect wealth during inflation, geopolitical instability or weakness in traditional currencies. Still, bitcoin has often traded more like a high-risk technology asset, rising and falling with broader investor appetite for risk.
Gold prices rallied recently amid heightened geopolitical tensions and concerns over the US-Iran conflict, while bitcoin struggled to maintain momentum despite a weaker dollar.
Cuban’s comments also reflect a wider divide within the crypto markets. While some investors remain focused on bitcoin as a macro hedge, others are increasingly seeing value in blockchain networks like Ethereum that support commerce, payments and tokenized financial applications rather than serving primarily as stores of value.
