Meet Australia’s almost-anything-goes crypto marketplace
Now you can cash out crypto into land, cleaning products, a business or several hundred flower paintings.
Running from left to right, the following items are for sale:
Top row: A gym with 400 members ("Condition: Used"), a camera, a very expensive painting and a self-help book ("tools, techniques and strategies to begin your journey of merging love and money").
Second row: Used car, $61 bottle of spray wipe, bitcoin ASIC miner and community land development share.
All of them have two things in common.
The first is that they're all being sold on ecryptostore.com. The second is that they can all be purchased with crypto. If you have $300,000 of Dogecoin burning a hole in your pocket and want to buy a gym business online, this is probably the place to go. The marketplace is still relatively new and unpopulated with only 232 items currently listed, 178 of which are Marie Gold Art Collection paintings, more or less equivalent in price and artistic merit to that flower painting above.
Ecryptostore's founder Nathan Burns isn't deterred by the slow start though, and sees it as a sign of cryptocurrency's increasing ease of use and acceptance. He points at the new listing of Nightcap Village, Australia's first land rights for crypto transactions as far as anyone knows, as an example of how far the technology has come.
"We are excited to help facilitate a smooth transaction of Bitcoin and Ethereum and to show how easy it actually is. We believe that this is possibly the first genuine realisation of multiple cryptocurrencies to purchase a share of this nature, and it has been achieved via Ecryptostore's platform. It paves the way for many future property transactions with cryptocurrency on Ecryptostore.com," he said.
"We believe that this transaction demonstrates that even when the financial side of the markets have slowed, people are happy to use crypto for real-world transactions and turn their digital assets into tangible assets. You most definitely can cash out of crypto-currencies very easily now."
Cashing out crypto might be even easier in Australia than elsewhere, with platforms like HiveSpend and Living Room of Satoshi emerging to allow Australians to very easily cash out crypto but not really showing up in any other countries.
Ecryptostore is reminiscent of Cryptopia, which got its start in early 2017 as a similar almost-anything-goes marketplace, but somewhat inadvertently ended up becoming one of New Zealand's largest crypto exchanges. Like Cryptopia and its native Dotcoin cryptocurrency, Ecryptostore is also planning its own token sale, selling "Free Market Token" coins to raise funds for further expanding the platform.
It's not clear whether this Free Market Token will actually serve a purpose beyond entertainment value. But in a bear market where most projects are scams, cash grabs or solutions looking for problems, having a laugh might be a decent ROI. If that doesn't sound like a good investment, you probably aren't interested in those $16,000 paintings either.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC and NANO.
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Picture: Shutterstock
