A five-unit apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, may represent the first foray into a new investment model that uses the technology underpinning cryptocurrency and allows investors to buy and sell their shares in a single property at the click of a button. The model relies on blockchain technology, which underlies cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. The project sets out to show how buying and selling an asset on the blockchain can help distribute wealth and improve transaction...

If blockchain technology is going to revolutionize how we transact with each other, computer scientists need to solve one big problem: It can consume way too much energy. The original blockchain, which underlies bitcoin, runs on an algorithm that could eat up more energy than Argentina this year, Morgan Stanley estimated. "Businesses have every incentive to avoid bitcoin's waste. It's very, very expensive to run things the way bitcoin runs things," said Cornell University computer science...