Mark Cuban Regrets 'Not Doing the Math' on Titan Crypto Investment As Team Denies Rug Pull
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has said it was "my mistake" for not adequately researching the TITAN cryptocurrency which crashed spectacularly this week.
The cryptocurrency token lost nearly all of its value on Wednesday, falling from over $60 on June 16 to slightly above zero on Thursday morning, according to CoinGecko data.
On Twitter, Cuban, a known cryptocurrency investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks baseball team, said he got "hit" by the crash. He later said he took responsibility for his investment loss.
The investor also said he was not sure, one way or another, if the crash was due to a "rug pull"—a type of cryptocurrency exit scam.
Iron Finance, the team behind TITAN, has denied this via a warning label on its website, present at the time of writing, which reads: "Please don't buy TITAN or IRON. There is no hacks, no exploits, or rug-pullings."
Cuban told Newsweek on Thursday: "I haven't dug in enough to know if there was something nefarious going on. But I do take responsibility for not doing the math before I invested.
"It was all in black and white how the math of the stable coin and TITAN worked. If I looked it was there—how much needed to be added in order to support TITAN and what would happen if sales overtook adds. I chose not to do the work.
"Is it possible they had every intention of pulling out all the revenue they could and running with it? I guess so. But I don't know one way or the other if that is true.
"For me, I decided it wasn't worth my time to dig in far enough. I took a flyer. My mistake."
Iron Finance said on June 17, that people would be able to redeem IRON for USDC stablecoin starting 5 p.m. UTC (1 p.m. EDT). The site allowing people to do so did not appear to be working when Newsweek tried to load it at 12:42 p.m. BST (7:42 a.m. EDT).
In a Thursday statement, Iron Finance said the TITAN crash was due to "the world's first large-scale crypto bank run," in which large investors in TITAN began to sell, prompting a further selloff.
It added: "When people panic and run over to the bank to withdraw their money in a short period, the bank may and will collapse.
"We have learned a great deal from this incident and while nothing could be fixed in the current system, we will continue our journey with more products in the future."
Cuban has not disclosed the amount he lost in the crash but told Bloomberg that his investment "wasn't so big that I felt the need to have to dot every I and cross every T."
He also called for more regulation to "define what a stable coin is."
Investopedia states that a stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that is backed by another asset—such as gold or the U.S. dollar—in an attempt to offer price stability.
Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the risks associated with cryptocurrency trading.
