With the value of $22.5 million, or more than 18 million euros. The very luxurious Arte Surfside residence, on the waterfront of Miami Beach in Florida, in the southeastern United States was paid for entirely in bitcoin.
This is the highest real estate sale ever in a cryptocurrency in the United States, reports the American financial magazine Forbes, Monday June 7, 2021.
Investing in stone to “preserve your fortune”
The apartment is located on the ninth floor (out of twelve) of the residence. It is a very luxurious property, which covers 470 m², specifies the website specializing in economic news Business Insider. It has four bedrooms, as many bathrooms and, above all, a huge 274 square meter terrace that overlooks the ocean.
The buyer(s) remained anonymous, and if the sale took place on May 27, the American media did not mention it until the beginning of June.
Why did the real estate developers behind this project agree to carry out this bitcoin transaction?
Indeed, the price of bitcoin, volatile, has suffered recently, between a turn of the screw from the Chinese authorities and the messages posted on Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk which caused its value to fall.
The idea of the promoters was to attract rich investors, with a fortune in bitcoins, and willing to invest part of it in the “real world”, in the words of Giovanni Fasciano, one of the two promoters.
It starts from the premise that a person with a substantial sum of money, in one currency or another, will want to “invest it in real estate” , in order to “preserve his fortune and his inheritance” . The two promoters, however, did not give specific information on how the transaction took place.
Is Miami the capital of bitcoin?
This is not the first time that an apartment or house sale has taken place in bitcoins. Dozens of such transactions have taken place in the United States in recent years.
For 2017 alone, the American real estate brokerage firm Redfin already listed 75. And Florida, the state where Miami Beach is located, is particularly concerned by the phenomenon.
Three years later, Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, “praises his city as the world capital of cryptocurrency”, indicated the American daily The New York Times, at the end of March 2021.
In February, the elected official had already indicated that he was considering allowing the inhabitants of the region to pay their local taxes in bitcoins, and municipal employees to receive their salaries in this virtual currency.