The Knox Group of Companies, with headquarters on the Isle of Man, announced this week that it will launch a residential and commercial property development in Dubai valued at £250-million (R4.2-billion), with residences that can be purchased in the digital currency bitcoin.
The company said the 22.3ha property venture, called Aston Plaza and Residences and consisting of two residential towers and a shopping mall, would be the first major real-estate development that would accept bitcoin as payment.
The Dubai project is one step towards efforts to push bitcoin into the mainstream. Maligned and ridiculed in its early days, the value of bitcoin has surged more than 400% so far this year.
The entire project is expected to be completed by late 2019.
"This is a great opportunity for the crypto-currency community to offload some of its significant gains, especially the early adopters, and actually deploy them in hardcore assets which I'm building," said Knox's chairman, Doug Barrowman.
The Dubai venture is a collaboration with Baroness Michelle Mone, a member of Britain's House of Lords and founder of the lingerie company Ultimo. Mone said her interior-design company would fit out the interiors of the apartments.
Bitcoin payments platform BitPay will process the bitcoin transactions. The company already provides bitcoin payment tools to companies such as Microsoft and Richard Branson's space venture, Virgin Galactic.
Knox's Barrowman said the current popularity of "initial coin offerings", a token-based method of fundraising for technology start-ups, had shown that there was a huge demand for crypto-investors to diversify their assets.
Studio apartments would start in price from 33 bitcoin and early investors would be given additional bonuses, Barrowman said.
Reuters
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