Most Influential 2021: Mark Cuban

When “Shark Tank” personality Mark Cuban sees the potential in something, he’s willing to put up big. This year the emergent world of decentralized finance (DeFi) received a boost of legitimacy (and capital) when the Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner said DeFi represented a real challenge to and advancement on the traditional banking system. Like all of us, the billionaire investor has been learning as he goes – sometimes leading to embarrassing public slip-ups. But Cuban isn’t afraid to take on a little risk, even gambling with his hard-earned street cred by calling for coherent crypto regulation.

This post is part of CoinDesk’s “Most Influential 2021″ series.

How is crypto going to change the world by 2030?

I think it will change how businesses are created, managed and funded. It will change personal and corporate banking. Trustless businesses will be perceived as better. We will use challenge-based optimistic rollups as part of trustless applications that handle insurance claims [and] applications for any number of things.

It will have the same impact on business and consumers as the internet did, if not more.

What was one lesson from this year?

My most important thing I learned was to take the time to dig deep into the tech, from learning Solidity to taking deep dives on tech like zk-rollups and optimistic rollups.