A landlord from Saskatoon started accepting cryptocurrency to help overseas students save on transfer costs.

Grant Spurdle, a landlord of the building 1311 Temperance St. in a residential neighbourhood Varsity View in Saskatoon, is now accepting bitcoin for rent payments, The StarPhoenix reports. The reasons of this decision were to give students who are transferring funds from overseas to reduce transaction costs and to encourage more people to use bitcoin. Spurdle is not very optimistic about the immediate results: he does not think that he will have tenants paying in bitcoin in the next couple of years because it is still difficult to use. However, he is enthusiastic about the bitcoin ecosystem in general.

Spurdle is going to advertise the new option to his tenants. He has already ordered stickers to put outside the building to let people know that the bitcoin currency is accepted for rent.

Paying rent in bitcoin is still not very widespread in the cryptoeconomy. In February, the London office of RE/MAX, a worldwide real estate franchise network, has launched the option to pay for property rentals in three cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin digital currency. Last year, the Manhattan-based real estate brokerage firm Bond New York integrated bitcoin payments for property transactions via Coinbase. Bitcoin has been used for property purchases on BitPremier, the bitcoin luxury marketplace, and by the Bitcoin Real Estate listings company. Rentalutions, the U.S. online property management platform, started accepting rent payments in bitcoin as early as 2013.

As CoinFox reported recently, Coinbase, one of the leading bitcoin wallets providers in the world, announced the expansion to Canada. Canadian customers can now buy and sell bitcoins with Canadian dollar via Buy/Sell service as well as trade the BTC/CAD pair on Coinbase Exchange. 

Aliona Chapel