Mark Cuban warns: Banks should be scared of DeFi

Legendary billionaire investor Mark Cuban said on Sunday that the U.S. government and regulators should start getting behind crypto innovations, like decentralized finance (DeFi). In other ways, the U.S. will “lose the next great growth engine that this country needs.”

Cuban outlined his mind in the blog post named “The Brilliance of Yield Farming, Liquidity Providing, and Valuing Crypto Projects.”

He has been extremely bullish on the future of decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), resuming with a sharp warning to the banking sector. He said that “banks should be scared” of these decentralized protocols that could become a real competitor for traditional banking.

Regarding the rise of DeFi, the prominent investor and owner of the NBA’s team Dallas Mavericks wrote that “there are a lot of financial institutions that should be concerned.”

In the post, Cuban also mentioned the wider potential of the DeFi industry. He noted that DeFis are, by design, decentralized and not linked to the USA. Then the investor rebuked regulators for pressing innovation out of the country.

“This is not only because of the ethos of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) but also because of the ABSOLUTE STUPIDITY of our regulators forcing some of the most impactful and innovative entrepreneurs of this generation to foreign countries to run their businesses,” the entrepreneur said.

He predicted that in 10-20 years we will look back and observe that world-changing companies were created during this period of time.

“Among those companies, it’s already a certainty that DeFi and other crypto organizations will be at or near the top of the list,” Cuban said, warning that if officials would continue to dampen innovation, this potential could be lost.

The crypto investor noticed that the DeFi firms don’t need to raise as much money as traditional ones, to begin with, or focus on maximizing profits.

“That is not to say that every crypto blockchain or DeFi project will work. They won’t,” Cuban said, “Crypto is brutally competitive. But in crypto versus traditional, centralized businesses, all other things being equal, I’m taking crypto every time,” he added.

According to Cuban’s words, when it comes to choosing which tokens to invest in, he looks at factors as current revenue, growth rates, how likely projects will keep a competitive advantage, and the strength of the community behind the project.

The entrepreneur admits the risks of this technology but still argues that “this approach is the future of personal banking.”

Aside from the risks, DeFi has been very popular recently. According to DeFi Pulse, more than $60 billion is now confined inside DeFi services.

Before, Cuban invested in several crypto companies, including DeFi projects Polygon and Aave, and has a portfolio of multiple cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.