The billionaire investor said a greater focus on applications and utility beyond finance will bring more people back to cryptocurrencies and could reverse the market’s downward trend.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is best known for being a major investor on the reality show “Shark Tank. He says the bear market in cryptocurrencies will not end unless people focus better on utility applications.

He also believes that the market has not yet reached a “cheap” price.

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Cuban has said in the past that about 80% of his portfolio outside of Genius Winners is in cryptocurrencies. In a June 23 episode of the Bankless Podcast, he was asked how long the current cryptocurrency bear market would last.

It will continue until a catalyst emerges, and that catalyst is apps.

He believes that a better focus on apps with utility will bring cryptocurrencies out of the downturn. Given the number of apps currently focused on fintech or collectibles, the launch of a business-focused app would be one of the events that triggers a market reversal.

Citing the “decentralized Quickbooks version” of small business accounting management software as an example, Cuban predicts that a similar software launch would attract a large number of users.

Although analysts predict that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and many other cryptocurrencies have bottomed out, Cuban said in his analysis of the high market value of some projects, “it’s not cheap yet.

You look at the market cap and you see $1 billion plus $6 billion, $8 billion or $40 billion, you don’t look at that and say ‘that’s cheap’. If you remember DeFi Summer, when these things cost less than a penny, the market cap was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

He added that even cryptocurrencies with lower market caps “don’t have much utility,” citing the decentralized exchange SushiSwap (SUSHI) token, which has a market cap of $215 million, as a “relatively cheap” purchase. He added, however, that

If you’re a liquidity provider, you’ll get paid, but who will buy it from you? What’s your reason for buying it?

Cuban believes that the entire cryptocurrency industry will consolidate as different protocols and blockchains merge with each other, because “that’s what happens in every industry.

Cuban said he supports the merging of various blockchains, shutting down other blockchains and then moving applications and communities to the same blockchain and providing a token exchange or bridge to transfer users from the closed blockchain.

Now that your user base has suddenly increased tenfold, you still need to develop better apps and still need to give users a reason to use the blockchain, but at least you might be able to have a better community to come up with ideas or you’ll be gone.

The crypto space has multiple subfields, such as Layer 1, Layer 2, NFT and DeFi tokens, and Cuban was asked which one he was most optimistic about.

Cuban said he was particularly interested in the carbon-offset DeFi token. This type of token refers to compensating for one’s carbon footprint by destroying tokens. He added that while not everyone cares about compensating for their carbon emissions, it’s “the easiest way to do it” compared to buying carbon offsets from a broker, which is “an annoying thing.

But ultimately, Cuban said, “all of these projects have potential, and that’s why they’re getting so much money, and all of them have reason to believe they’re better than everyone else and believe they’re going to succeed.”