To all the agents in the house,
I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's "The Nineties" and it's chalked with pop history about the internet. While the 90s might be best remembered for the world wide web, Klosterman observes, the internet was not the totalizing life force it is now.
"What's so disorienting about the internet of the 1990s is the paradox of its centrality: It was the most important thing that happened, but its importance is still overrated," Klosterman writes. "The facts don't align with the atmosphere of the memory."
I would be surprised if historians looked back at the early 2020s and determined that the growing use of cryptocurrency was the most important world event, or even second most behind COVID-19.
Still, transacting deals with currencies not issued by a central bank on an anonymous blockchain is mainstream enough that President Joe Biden on Wednesday directed executive branch agencies, "To address the risks and harness the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology."
A White House statement on the seemingly vague executive order, asserts, "Surveys suggest that around 16% of adult Americans, approximately 40 million, have invested in, traded or used cryptocurrencies."
Agents, this is an issue that is near and dear to my work right now. I'm heading to Miami later today for a conference put on by the World Crypto Economic Forum and Palo Alto, California-based company Propy, a company that seeks to put real estate deals on the blockchain platform.
Propy was behind the first U.S. home sale using a non-fungible token, a deal that went down in suburban St. Petersburg, Florida in February. But there is skepticism that NFTs could replace title deeds as tokens, or improve the real estate transaction if they did.
Putting the real estate sale on the blockchain expedites a home sale, Propy's CEO Natalya Karayaneva has pointed out. But the American Land Title Association notes the biggest reason there's 50 days between a home being in contract and closing is not because county governments or sleepy title companies lose paperwork in the mail or something. It's because homebuyers are inspecting their new abode, and hammering out a mortgage. These activities take time because they're important, not because they're stuck in an analog world.
The Klosterman book also has a chapter called "Yesterday's concept of tomorrow." It catalogs, among other somewhat forgotten phenomena, the 90s fixation on cloning, following the successful cloning of Scottish sheep Dolly. I wonder if, for real estate at least, cryptocurrency will be remembered more as a curiosity. Or is the Biden executive order the latest sign crypto is infiltrating most corners of the economy?
Agents please send me your thoughts at mblake@housingwire.com.
Sincerely,
Matthew Blake
Senior Real Estate Reporter
.png?width=1116&upscale=true&name=Brand-Q1-2022-970x250-original%20(1).png)
EmoticonEmoticon