Shared Standards Would Help Global Crypto Real Estate Market

Denitza Tyufekchieva, business development manager of Propy has expressed a need for different locales to adopt shared real estate regulations. While completing transactions with the disparate regulations in today’s environment is possible and even relatively simply for Propy, it would still help the global market, she says.

“In the future, we envision a world with a global standard for registering [property]. […] Imagine we all have one global standard for our properties and we can actually transfer them”

Propy is a real estate blockchain company, facilitating global real estate deals while also supporting cryptocurrencies. They also submit the deeds to the blockchain, enabling secure digital storage and accessibility. But it’s their buying platform, which they compare to Zillow, that is most significant. Besides supporting cryptocurrencies as a payment method, they also support multiple languages, further boosting their cross-border credentials.

The issue is in how careful they have to be to not overstep regulation in the various locales and the European and United States systems, that are quite similar anyway, should unite behind one.

“We want Europe and the US to understand that there are common themes in their standards, so of course we could have a global standard.”

They have already done more than a dozen transactions using the Ethereum network. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, they are very large and legally complicated. Adding a layer of crypto payments and all that entails adds another layer of complexity.

But Propy feels that the cross-border nature of cryptocurrency and the permanence and accessibility of the blockchain makes it worth it. And that enables Propy to simplify the entire process overall, despite the added crypto complexity.

Buying a property is complex. It involves multiple middlemen, including agents and banks on both sides, but it doesn’t need to. For people paying upfront, real estate sales don’t have any need to be any more complex than buying any other item. Propy is on the way to accomplishing that.

Propy raised 15 million from its ICO last year. And like all ICOs, there is an open question on its legality when considering the recent comments by the SEC. Hopefully, its use within the Propy platform as a means of settlement will prevent it from attracting the SEC’s ire.

Currently, transferring property deeds requires the involvement of the government. Propy does not and could not cut them out of the process. Instead, they make it so every transaction is legally compliant in their location. The eventual goal is to make Propy and its blockchain transactions, part of the way the government itself transfers properties.

But that is a long way off, so, for now, they do both the legal transfer and the move on the blockchain, which provides a provable record of the transaction for as long as the blockchain exists. But to get to that next step, they need to get governments on board, and as Tyufekchieva said, a unified standard would go a long way to making that a possibility.