You can buy this house with Dogecoin: But will you?

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

SALT LAKE CITY TECH ENTREPRENEUR Scott Paul put his longtime rental house up for sale In June on Homie.com, hoping to tap the red hot housing market. The price: $400,000--with a 10 percent discount if the buyer paid in Dogecoin.

It didn't happen. Paul closed on the house in September with a full-price offer, but he got it in US dollars. Yet his cryptocurrency discount underscores cryptocurrency's growing prevalence in real estate.

The crypto market has grown by almost $2 trillion this year alone and prices have surged across the board in recent months, even prompting the Biden Administration to consider an executive order on how to better regulate the industry for the sake of national security.

An estimated 47 percent of millennial millionaires have more than a quarter of their wealth in cryptocurrencies, according to a June survey by CNBC of 750 investors with at least $1 million in investable assets. More than a third of millennial millionaires have at least half their wealth in crypto.

A quick primer: cryptocurrency includes one of various online monetary systems, which includes more than 1,300 coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, BNB, XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin. These cryptocurrencies operate independently of governments or banks, and each payment is documented and verified through the blockchain, which is an online, shared database.

A decade after its birth, crypto is starting to move to offline purchases. More than 100,000 merchants--including Petco, Tesla, Famous Footwear, Bed Bath & Beyond, Nordstrom, Expedia, and Ulta Beauty--now accept crypto as payment for goods using the Gemini app or debit cards via crypto exchanges like Coinbase. Soon, vacation rental houses, parking spots, and dream homes will also be purchased on the blockchain.

In fact, more home sellers like Paul have begun advertising in home listings that they will accept crypto for full or partial payment.

Paul was the first to list a home for crypto on Homie, a Utah-based platform that gives sellers more transparency and control over the home selling process with the support of licensed agents and experts. But as regulation and standards emerge, closing home sales with cryptocurrency may be far more common in the future, says Homie founder and CEO Johnny Hanna.

Real estate companies across the world are already using blockchain smart contracts--in which agreement terms are written directly into lines of code--to make buying, renting, investing, and even lending...