TechCrunch Founder Sells $1.6 Million House on Crypto Real Estate Platform

Propy, a blockchain based real estate platform, announced the sale of a $1.6 million San Francisco property owned by the venture capital fund CrunchFund, co-founded by Michael Arrington.

The announcement follows news of Propy's highest cost transaction to date, a $2.4 million duplex in San Francisco, completed entirely on the platform.

Propy is a real-estate transaction platform that empowers buyers, sellers, their agents, and escrow agents to close a traditional real estate deal entirely online.

"The traditional real estate sale process is arduous and broken. Buyers, sellers, and their professional support struggle with overly complex interactions - it's an opaque, dated, and unnecessarily lengthy process, full of risks such as wire fraud," said Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, whose most recent venture is into blockchain capital investments and management with his $100m firm, Arrington XRP Capital.

"Blockchain's main implications, after [virtual] money, is as a technology that enables ownership transfers it aligns the entire process of any value transfer including real estate."

Propy completed its first deal in 2017, and its first US transaction in Vermont 12 months ago.

Worldwide, they have assisted in some form in over 60 real estate transfers.

The median price of a house sold on its platform is around $1.5 million, said Karayaneva, though the value of the houses is steadily increasing.

Karayaneva believes in two or three years the majority of real estate transactions will be entirely digitized.

Arrington previously purchased a $60,000 apartment in Kiev through Propy, using ethereum and smart contracts to settle the deal.