From the outside, 304 Troutman Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, looks fairly ordinary. In most ways, it is. But this nondescript three-story, five-unit rental building is part of an experiment in using the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin to transform the New York housing market.

“This is going to be a paradigm shift,” said Mo Shaikh, a founder of Meridio, a Brooklyn-based company looking to introduce blockchain technology to real estate.

As a secure, decentralized way to register and store payments and transactions online through “smart contracts,” blockchain technology will give each of the eight investors who currently own the building cryptocurrency tokens that can be traded and secure access to a crypto-protected database that stores individual transaction data. In theory, the technology will make it nearly impossible for hackers to do widespread damage and will protect against the kind of identity theft that conventional investors might be vulnerable to.

“Blockchain is just an efficient way of asset exchange: The assets can be cryptocurrency, stocks, bonds, art or real estate,” said Corbin Page, Mr. Shaikh’s partner in Meridio, an offshoot of a larger company called Consensys.