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Mark Cuban, the billionaire Shark Tank star, said the crypto bear market won’t come to an end until there’s a better use for blockchain applications.

He added he doesn’t think the market has reached “cheap” prices yet.

Cuban has said in the past around 80% of his non-Shark Tank portfolio was in crypto. Appearing on a June 23 episode of the Bankless Podcast, he was asked how long he believes the current crypto bear market will last:

“It lasts until there’s a catalyst and that catalyst is going to be an application, or we get so low people go ‘fuck it I'll buy some.’”

He said that a better focus on applications with utility will pull crypto from the bloodbath and with so many apps focused on financial technology or collectibles, the launch of a business-focused application could spark a reversal for markets.

Pointing to the example of a “decentralized version of Quickbooks,” a small business accounting management software, Cuban predicted a rush of users if something like that launched.

Despite analysts predicting that Bitcoin (BTC) as well as many other cryptocurrencies have hit a price bottom, Cuban says “it’s not cheap yet” when analyzing the high market capitalization of some projects:

“You look at the market caps, and you see it’s a billion dollar plus market cap or $6 billion or $8 billion or $40 billion you don’t look at that and go ‘that's cheap.’ If you remember back to DeFi Summer, these things were selling for less than a penny and their market caps were in the hundreds of millions.”

He also said that even with lower market cap cryptos “there’s no utility,” and gives an example of the decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap (SUSHI) token as a “relatively cheap” buy with its $215 million market cap, he added:

“You get paid it if you’re a liquidity provider, but then who’s going to buy it from you? What’s the reason to buy it from you?”

Cuban believes mergers between different protocols and blockchains will push the crypto industry to consolidate, as “that’s what happens in every industry.”

“I’d rather get with somebody who says ‘let’s do a roll-up,’” with Cuban saying that he’d support a merge of various blockchains, close others and then move applications and communities over to just one and offer a token exchange or bridge from the closing blockchains to port users over:

“Now all of a sudden your user base is 10x, you still have a problem of better applications, you still have to have some reason people want to use that blockchain but at least you may be able to have a better community to come up with ideas because otherwise you’re gone.”