A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Anyone who has bought or sold a home knows how long and tedious the closing process can be. This involves outdated paperwork requiring multiple signatures from various parties, disclosures, and a bunch of compliance forms. Some of the process has been digitalized, but most of it hasn’t. A remedy emerges: put everything on the blockchain. Propy, a Miami-based blockchain technology company launched in 2017, has attempted to modernize the closing process and recently received a major financial boost to do so. In late January, Propy announced it had secured a $100 million credit facility from Metropolitan Partners Group, a private investment firm. The money would be used, he said, to consolidate title and escrow companies into an end-to-end closing platform powered by artificial intelligence. “We are convinced that blockchain is the next phenomenon after the Internet,” said Natalia Karayaneva, founder and CEO of Propy. “The Internet has moved information, blockchain will move value. It’s already moving money. It’s moving Treasury. However, the real estate industry is still behind the times.” This is mainly because the industry doesn’t exactly understand blockchain, Karayaneva said. Blockchain is like a huge shared digital filing cabinet that no one can control. Items recorded on the blockchain cannot be modified. “This technology allows us to record acts and transactions, and it is impossible to modify this data,” Karayaneva said. “This allows us to be a fraud-free system.” Currently, Propy has acquired four established title companies, but the transition is not easy. These title companies “have a really big fear of AI, and when we acquire them, we do this in-person training on both AI and blockchain and cryptocurrency. We have implemented courses and training for these depository agents on how to carry out transactions, but once they understand, the transaction happens by itself,” Karayaneva said. She noted that closures that once took weeks may now take just a few hours. When Propy receives a signed purchase contract for a property, whether from a REIT, real estate developer or real estate agent, its AI extracts the data – purchase contract, address, all the contingencies, all the conditions – and then a smart contract on blockchain starts. “We do this through our fintech solutions, but the blockchain immediately gets this data on the public blockchain,” Karayaneva said. Meet Avery Propy is also using its new funding to develop an AI agent to facilitate transactions. The agent, named Avery, responds directly to customers at all times, explaining how Propy works and what the AI does. Avery even has an Instagram account. Avery constantly checks emails and transactions, extracts all the data points, then feeds it all into a smart contracts platform. The agent can also make calls. “She’s an escrow agent who never sleeps,” Karayaneva said, noting that some clients don’t even realize she’s not a human. “It’s an omnichannel communication where it can communicate with our buyers, our sellers, with REITs, our institutional clients and with sellers, for example ordering mortgage payments to sellers.” The GENIUS Act A major milestone for blockchain technology was reached last year with the passage of the GENIUS Act, which gave it what Karayaneva calls “legitimacy.” It created rules for stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies linked to the US dollar. It requires that companies issuing these coins, which are transferred to the blockchain, must actually hold real dollars or secure assets behind them. “Real estate developers and REITs started turning to Propy, because we established this brand for so many years with our firm belief that there was a way to legally accept cryptocurrencies in real estate, legally register them on the blockchain and in the county, of course,” Karayaneva said. “It sparked all this huge interest from real estate developers.” Miami, in particular, where Propy is based, is seeing huge demand from international buyers, many of whom prefer to use cryptocurrencies. Karayaneva, who grew up in the former Soviet Union and said she saw properties seized by the central government, said she deeply believed in the technology’s potential to protect consumers, especially in developing countries. The decentralized nature of blockchain provides an immutable record of ownership. “Real estate is the largest and most important asset class in the world. It is the foundation of democracy and capitalism,” Karayaneva said. “It makes sense to move this asset class on-chain. People need to own this record, and they need to own it in a decentralized way.”