Portugal has become a paradise for those who are taking the plunge into handling cryptocurrencies. And now it has reached a milestone in real estate transactions because it is the first country in Europe where a house is sold exclusively using bitcoins.
The transaction was closed last May 5 in Braga, the third city of the country. There, 58 kilometers from Porto and 110 from Vigo, a man used three of these virtual currencies to seal the deal and get a three-bedroom apartment. And how much are those three bitcoins equivalent to in euros? Well, 110,000 euros, the amount required to finalize the agreement before going to Póvoa de Varzim to formalize the deed.
A new regulation in this sense has just come into force throughout the Portuguese territory, which ends with the need to ‘translate’ cryptocurrencies into euros. Everything changes with the new legislation, since the procedure is different today and has been simplified. Thus, the customer has to clearly show the cryptocurrency, with the guarantee that all controls are activated in order to preserve cybersecurity.
Naturally, cyber precautions are one of the big priorities in this context: communicating the number of the digital deposit, identifying the parties involved, proving that the money leaves one wallet to another at the time of the transaction. Indeed, the steps being taken by the neighboring country guarantee that it will not be left behind in the universe of the new economy.
As a sample, the report conducted by the British consulting and real estate firm Savills, which certifies that the world city preferred by digital nomads is Lisbon. It is this influential urban tribe that has taken the word and the result is already noticeable in the Portuguese capital, where foreigners are willing to spend almost twice as much as a local citizen to buy a home.
