Portugal’s first property sale in cryptocurrency might have looked unremarkable, but it didn’t feel that way to those who had been working for nearly a year to make it happen.
On May 4, in an office in the northern city of Braga, two men pulled up chairs in front of Apple laptops. João Marques, the seller, passed a crypto wallet address to the buyer, who made a transfer and became the new owner of an apartment in the city worth €110,000 — just under three bitcoin at the time. The president of the Portuguese chamber of notaries, Jorge Silva, watched on — as did Carlos Santos, chief technology officer at the Portuguese real estate company Zome, which brokered the sale.
The whole process took just a few minutes but it was the culmination of many months of discussions between Portuguese tax, financial and notary authorities to agree on how to allow property transactions to happen entirely in cryptocurrency.