Billionaire Mark Cuban, Shark Tank investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, calls himself one of Ethereum's (ETH) staunch supporters.
This is because, the upcoming merger of ETH allows for the reduction of the carbon footprint of the blockchain, shrinking the supply of ether and potentially having a positive impact on the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.
According to Cuban at Fortune, he became a fan of the ETH merger because he felt the issue of energy consumption was important and saw the proof of stake move as a positive thing.
Therefore, ETH will switch the proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake on September 15.
In context, proof-of-work is an energy-intensive process that relies on miners to add new blocks and verify transactions, while proof-of-stake relies on a network of validators.
In other words, once the merger takes place, mining on ETH will be eliminated and energy consumption is expected to drop by 99.9%.
Cuban also insists that proof-of-stake requires a long period of time and he is not sure when it will increase, but he remains confident in ETH.
While discussing his association with Ethereum, Cuban stated several times that the network's applications and use cases are the reason behind his support.
He added that he is very interested in smart contracts, which are collections of code that execute a set of instructions on the blockchain. In fact, creating decentralized finance (DeFi) as well as non-fungible tokens (NFT).
In total, Cuban owns Ether and other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin, while his portfolio also consists of NFTs and investments in blockchain companies.
