The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
I have never owned a cryptocurrency, and I don’t intend to. I spent years assuming it was a fad that would burn itself out before I had to learn anything about it. Instead, one Canadian in four now holds some, according to a recent Ontario Securities Commission survey, nearly double the share of two years ago, and nobody tracks how much of it ends up as a down payment. What follows is what I have figured out, for agents who, like me, would rather not have to.
What it actually is
Think of the money in your bank account; it isn’t physical. It is a number on a screen, and the bank keeps the record of how much you have.
A cryptocurrency is the same idea with one change: there is no bank. Thousands of computers worldwide keep the record, each holding the same copy. When someone sends a coin to someone else, every copy updates at once. Anyone can look at the record. Nobody can sneak in and change it afterward, because the other thousands of copies would disagree. That shared record is what people mean by the blockchain, and it is the only clever part.
Bitcoin was the first, launched in 2009 by someone whose real name nobody knows. There are thousands of others now. Most are worthless.
To get some, you open an account with an exchange, a website that works like an online stock brokerage, and you pay dollars for coins. The coins sit in a wallet, which is not a wallet at all, but a long secret password. Lose the password and the coins are gone for good, with no customer service line to call.
A coin’s price is whatever the next person will pay. No company backs it, no one rents it and no factory runs it. That is why it can rise 30 per cent in a month and fall just as far the next, and the market never closes. A stablecoin is a coin designed to hold a value of US$1, used to park money inside the crypto world without the swings.
In Canada, any exchange serving Canadians must register with securities regulators and FINTRAC, the federal anti-money-laundering agency.
Who owns it
Mostly people who bought it as an investment through a phone app. A Bank of Canada staff paper published in March 2025 found that in 2023, about one Canadian in 10 owned bitcoin, and the figure was closer to one in five among those aged 18 to 34. The OSC’s survey, conducted by Ipsos with 2,360 Canadians between December 2025 and January 2026, puts overall crypto ownership at 25 per cent. Those are real numbers, and they explain why the subject will not go away.
Where it touches my practice
Hardly at all, and I suspect most agents who talk about it know that.
In 16 years, I haven’t had a seller ask to be paid in bitcoin, and I haven’t written an offer with a crypto deposit. The people I know in this business say the same. I asked around before writing this and couldn’t find a single practitioner who could describe a crypto transaction. Instead, I found many columns, webinars and conference panels, most delivered by people who don’t sell houses, announcing that crypto is about to transform how Canadians buy and sell real estate. Some of those pieces are five years old, and the transformation still hasn’t arrived.
Every step of a real estate transaction in this country runs through the regulated banking system, and none of it touches crypto. The deposit goes into a brokerage trust account. The lender wants to see the down payment in a Canadian bank account, usually for about 90 days, with a paper trail showing its source. The lawyer moves funds through the same system, and the land registry records the purchase price in Canadian dollars. A buyer can hold U.S. dollars, euros or any other currency a bank will accept, but bitcoin isn’t one of them. Crypto must be sold and the proceeds deposited before anyone on our side of the deal sees a cent. By the time it reaches us, it looks like any other down payment. The crypto part happened earlier, on an app, well before the deal closed.
So, a quarter of Canadians own the stuff, and almost none of it reaches our files in any form we would recognize. What does reach us is the delay. Selling coins, waiting for an exchange to release the funds and letting the money sit long enough for a lender to accept it takes weeks. A buyer who says their money is in crypto is telling me they are not ready to make an offer, even if they believe they are. That is the one practical thing I need to know, and it is a timing problem, not a technology problem.
The other practical thing is tax. Selling crypto for dollars is a taxable event in Canada, usually a capital gain. A buyer who cashes out $80,000 to fund a purchase may owe tax next spring on a profit already spent on a house. That is the accountant’s conversation, but a buyer is better off hearing it before making an offer than after.
Talk is cheap, transactions aren’t
I suspect crypto comes up so often in our industry because so few of us have handled it. It’s easy to sound like an authority on something your audience can’t check against their own deal files. Some agents are dazzled by the idea, and a few are far too impressed by self-appointed experts who show up at conferences and in their inboxes. A seller who accepts bitcoin makes the news because it almost never happens. Crypto-backed mortgages do exist, offered by specialty lenders at specialty rates, but hardly anyone takes one. Tokenized condo projects are real too, and still largely experimental. I haven’t seen any of this reach the average practice in my part of Ontario, or anywhere else I know of. When someone tells you it has, check whether they also have a course to sell. They usually do.
What has reached us is mostly internet chatter, much of it from people who speak about crypto with great confidence but have never used it to buy or sell a property. For a while I nodded along with them. Then I sat down and did the reading, because I wanted to understand crypto in a practical sense, not a theoretical one. I suspect most of you want the same thing. I don’t need to know how a blockchain works. I need to know what happens when a buyer’s down payment started out as bitcoin.
Once I understood the basics, I could stop nodding and ask a useful question: when will the money be in a bank account, and can you show me where it came from?
Plenty of Canadians own crypto, but it almost never arrives in a real estate deal as anything other than ordinary money. Learn enough to ask about timing and the paper trail. As for the people predicting that our business is about to change, I’ll take them seriously when a buyer at my own table proves them right.
Dixie MacDonald is a sales representative with Sotheby’s International Realty Canada in Prince Edward County and Quinte, with more than 16 years in residential resale. A trusted and effective Realtor, she welcomes referrals.
In addition to a B.A. in English Literature and two certificates in adult education, she holds the SRES, ABR, GREENre, CCRS, CCGR and PSA designations. She facilitates in the provincial real estate education program and is a professional development instructor with various boards and associations. She writes for REM and on Substack.
Dixie MacDonald Sales Representative Sotheby’s International Realty Canada 1867 Yonge Street, Suite 100, Toronto ON M4S 1Y5 t 416.960.9995 | f 416.960.3222 dixie.macdonald@
