Even in the volatile world of cryptocurrencies, things rarely go south as fast as they did with the Titan token.
Wednesday afternoon, the cryptocurrency was trading for $65. As of 11 A.M. ET today, it was going for $0.000000024, according to Slingshot, a price tracker.
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Among the people who felt those losses was Mark Cuban, billionaire investor, crypto enthusiast, and Dallas Mavericks owner. Cuban, who talked up the decentralized finance project in a blog post four days ago, says he was impacted by the crash, but didn’t say by how much.
Cuban, though, could have been a contributor to the Titan token’s explosive gains.
His blog post was enthusiastic about the crypto coin and another, QuickSwap. The piece concluded with,“As long as I keep making a good return, I will keep my money invested.” It’s a big about-face for Cuban, who, in 2017, called cryptocurrency a “bubble”.
Many crypto investors follow the lead of crypto-friendly billionaires’ comments—and that could have contributed to the surge. At the start of June 13, the day of Cubans’ blog post, Titan was trading at $29. Three days later, it hit its peak.
The crash came as investors sold off their holdings, and others followed their lead. That flooded the market with excess tokens and large investors began to dump the crypto. By 7:26 p.m. ET, the tokens were worth just one cent.
While Cuban didn’t put a dollar value on his losses, he did tell Bloomberg that it was enough of a hit to cause some frustration.
“As a percentage of my crypto portfolio it was small. But it was enough that I wasn’t happy about it,” Cuban said. “But in a larger context it is no different than the risks I take [in] angel investing. In any new industry, there are risks I take on with the goal of not just trying to make money but also to learn. Even though I got rugged on this, it’s really on me for being lazy.”
“The thing about DeFi”—so-called decentralized finance—”plays like this,” Cuban continued, “is that it’s all about revenue and math and I was too lazy to do the math to determine what the key metrics were.”
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