Surfside Penthouse Bought with Crypto Sells at Loss for $18M
Chain’s Deepak Thapliyal with 8955 Collins Avenue (Chain via Twitter, Google Maps, Getty)
An Arte penthouse in Surfside sold at a loss for $18 million. That’s down $4.5 million from its sale price last year, when it was purchased with cryptocurrency.
The ninth-floor penthouse at the condominium at 8955 Collins Avenue sold for $22.5 million last year, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal closed after developer Alex Sapir and his partner, Giovanni Fasciano, opened crypto financing to potential buyers via SolidBlock, a blockchain and securities trading platform based in Miami Beach. It still holds the record for largest known real estate purchase with crypto. The sale also set a price-per-square-foot record for the area at the time, at $4,441, according to a press release from Sapir.
The unit first listed for $28 million in September of last year, and the price dropped several times, bottoming out at $19.9 million in November, according to Compass.
Danny Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group at Coldwell Banker Realty and Craig Heger of Echo Fine Properties had the listing. Oren Alexander of Official brought the buyer.
The deed has yet to be recorded, and the buyer is unknown. The seller is Chain, a company that builds blockchain-based fintech and Web3 cloud services. According to LinkedIn, the company is headquartered in Charlestown, on the Caribbean island of Nevis. CEO Deepak Thapliyal is an NFT collector, and promotes the Ethereum-backed Bored Ape Yacht Club collection.
The crypto market is in a steep downturn and reeling from the spectacular collapse of one of its largest exchange platforms, FTX. Hertzberg told the outlet that Chain sold the unit for cash this time.
Unit PHB spans almost 5,100 square feet, with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and one half-bathroom. The 12-story, 16-unit oceanfront building includes a fitness center, pool, spa, sauna, and tennis court. The condo’s amenities also include a playroom for children, catering kitchen, and a lounge, according to its website.
Aside from its experimentation with crypto financing, Arte Surfside also gained notoriety as the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner after the real estate heirs left Washington, D.C., last year. The couple rented the top-floor penthouse, in addition to the waterfront Indian Creek estate they bought for $24 million last year.
Other big name residents include New York-based hedge funder Emilio Bassini, who bought a unit for $13 million last year.
More recently, Sapir Corp. sold two units in the building in February for a combined $23.4 million.
— Kate Hinsche
