Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has claimed he was "hit" by a cryptocurrency token market crash on Wednesday.
The token, known as the IRON Titanium Token or TITAN, fell from over $60 on June 16 to a fraction over zero on Thursday morning, CoinGecko data shows.
The token is linked to Iron Finance, a group that runs the wider IRON Stablecoin project, which aims to avoid price volatility.
On Thursday, Fred Schebesta, founder of the Finder.com finance site and Iron Finance investor, told CoinDesk the sudden crash in TITAN was caused by panic-selling by "whales"—individuals who hold large amounts of a certain token.
He said: "TITAN's price went to $65 and then pulled back to $60. This caused whales to start selling."
The news was soon being discussed on Twitter. Replying to one user, Cuban wrote: "I got hit like everyone else."
He also claimed to have "got out" at one point, though he did not specify when.
I got hit like everyone else. Crazy part is I got out, thought they were increasing their TVL enough. Than Bam.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) June 16, 2021
Experts have previously warned Newsweek about some of the risks and dangers associated with cryptocurrency trading.
Cuban is known to have been involved in TITAN, having mentioned the token on his blog in the past.
In a June 13 post titled "The Brilliance of Yield Farming, Liquidity Providing and Valuing Crypto Projects," Cuban wrote that he was a liquidity provider (LP) for the QuickSwap decentralized exchange platform.
He said: "I provide 2 different tokens (DAI/TITAN) that enable QuikSwap to offer swaps between these two tokens."
On Twitter, many users have referred to the TITAN crash as a rug-pull—a type of exit scam whereby cryptocurrency developers abandon a project and leave with investors' funds.
However, Schebesta told CoinDesk "there was no rug pull" involved in the TITAN crash.
Waking up to Mark Cuban being rugged by DeFi project $TITAN 🙈 https://t.co/JO5Utio5ps
— Mounia | IPC (@Mounia_NL) June 17, 2021
$60 to $0 in hours, the $TITAN rug pull is now a legendary tale😂😂
— 𝕋𝕙𝕖𝕠🇸🇻 (@Theo_mwangi) June 17, 2021
Cuban is known to have an interest in cryptocurrency and has spoken out about Dogecoin on television before. He is also positive about the future of decentralized finance, writing on his June 13 blog post that "there are a lot of financial institutions that should be concerned" by competition from it.
On Wednesday, CoinDesk reported that Cuban had joined the decentralized dClimate network, which aims to collect and monetize climate data, forecasts, and models and then sell them on.
It comes amid long-standing concerns around the sustainability of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency more widely due to energy usage.
Last month, billionaire Elon Musk announced his electric car company Tesla had stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment because of similar concerns.
He later said the company would resume accepting Bitcoin "when there's confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend."
