Blockchain technology allows decentralized accommodation rentals, enabling users to rent spare rooms without depending on centralized platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com, which impose their own rules and fees. Currently, there is no existing decentralized solution for this purpose. Smart contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) can provide a transparent, user-governed alternative for enforcing regulations and distributing decision-making power through token ownership. The paper presents a proof-of-concept for implementing a decentralized application for short-term accommodation rentals deployed on Ethereum and the IOTA blockchain. The aim is to compare the costs associated with using these platforms and verify whether IOTA’s layer 2 smart contracts are a more cost-effective way of operating smart contracts. We demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the system on the blockchain and show its potential for benchmarking a novel approach to smart contracts introduced by IOTA. Based on the testing, we conclude that IOTA was more attractive from a financial point of view than the Ethereum network, however, currently this claim is not valid. Recent upgrades to the Ethereum network and the increase of Layer-2 solutions have made Ethereum increasingly comparable to IOTA. On the other hand, migrating EVM smart contracts to MoveVM smart contracts on Layer-1 could provide better performance and security. Additionally, from a development perspective, IOTA’s toolkit is more limited than Ethereum’s, which can be attributed to its relatively early stages of development. The resulting solution introduced in this paper distinguishes itself from other existing solutions by using the latest state-of-the-art Ethereum non-fungible asset standards to achieve its goals.