When luxury brokerage Sotheby’s International Realty announced in September it had facilitated one of the first U.S. home sales for bitcoin, the dollar value of a single bitcoin equaled $3,429.
Since the sale of the home in Austin, Texas, for which the sales price was never disclosed, the value of a single bitcoin—a cryptocurrency backed by an online ledger called the blockchain—has quadrupled to over $14,600 and turned a swath of early adopters into millionaires in a matter of months. At one point in December a single bitcoin was worth as much as $19,200.