Buy This Striking Miami Penthouse with 514 Bitcoin

Made a ton of money in crypto lately? Thinking maybe it’s time to park your decentralized digital currency somewhere tangible and relatively safe, like real estate? Diversifying your portfolio by buying a house is definitely a great idea, and real estate is far less volatile than the topsy-turvy crypto market.

Converting cryptocurrency to dollars is one way to buy property, but using some form of crypto as payment is quickly becoming more popular and even encouraged, especially with high-end new builds. Arte, a brand-new boutique building in Surfside, Fla., just north of Miami Beach, is one of the new-fangled developments actively courting crypto buyers. Developers Alex Sapir and Giovanni Fasciano say that interested buyers are welcome to make offers in either Bitcoin or Ethereum.

The asking price for the lower penthouse shown here, which takes up the whole ninth floor of the 12-story building, is listed with Ryan Farbstein of Douglas Elliman for $28 million. With Bitcoin valued at $54,472 at time of writing, 514 are needed for the purchase today, though that number naturally changes with the value of Bitcoin.

With an enormous wraparound terrace of nearly 3,000 square feet, the apartment offers 360-degree views of the ocean, shoreline, and city skyline. The four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath space spans nearly 5,100 square feet, and the sale includes all the (fairly generic) furniture so the buyer need only bring a toothbrush and a bathing suit. There’s direct elevator entry with fingerprint recognition technology, a walk-in pantry, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, and even a separate wine-tasting bar.

Notable features of the building include a temperature-controlled private parking garage — this penthouse transfers with three deeded spaces, a rooftop tennis court, outdoor and indoor pools, a spa-wellness area with yoga space, a children’s playroom, and, the big draw in Miami, direct beach access.

So how does this work? Usually, crypto is converted into U.S. dollars at an agreed exchange rate; the transaction is done through payment processor BitPay. After an invoice is generated, the buyer has 15 minutes to lock in a rate to convert the crypto to cash. Then the dollars are transferred to an escrow account. In some cases, as with Arte, buyers can transfer their crypto directly to the seller without exchanging it for cash — a wallet-to-wallet transaction. This could be risky depending on the crypto’s value, but it does maintain the anonymity for which cryptocurrency was built. Guess it will take a while to see how well this works out.