About a year ago, Nikolai Denisenko, former lead backend engineer at European fintech company Revolut, began formalizing the process by which “special customers” of his new crypto payment app Brighty could buy real estate using digital assets.
Since then, demand has exploded.
Brighty has so far brokered more than 100 transactions for high-net-worth clients of the Lithuanian licensed platform, allowing them to purchase apartments with cryptocurrencies, with more transactions planned. According to Denisenko, residential real estate purchases are mainly made in the UK, France, Malta, Cyprus and Andorra.
“We have 100 to 150 wealthy customers and are growing rapidly,” Denisenko, Brighty App’s co-founder and CTO, said in an interview. “The average spend for these people is about $50,000 per month. The upper end of the use case is buying an apartment in Europe. The size of these transactions varies from about $500,000 to about $2.5 million.”
This trend is another clear sign that cryptocurrencies are emulating traditional finance, with wealthy investors often preferring to de-risk their portfolios by investing some of their liquid assets in safe havens of hard assets such as real estate.
Given that banks shy away from such transactions, it is no wonder there is a demand to cater to the needs of wealthy crypto holders looking to make large purchases. According to the Crypto Wealth Report 2025, the number of crypto millionaires in the world will increase by 40% in 12 months to 241,700 in 2025.
A long-standing concern about cryptocurrencies has been the idea that digital assets could easily be used to launder the proceeds of crime.
However, Denisenko defended banks’ hesitance, telling CoinDesk that advanced blockchain analysis tools allow them to conduct sufficient due diligence on customer funds. He noted that most traditional financial institutions are likely to be intimidated by cryptocurrencies when evaluating the funding sources needed to purchase a home.
“The starting point is that these investors hold cryptocurrencies, and even though these people have earned this wealth from Bitcoin very transparently, that could scare banks,” Denisenko said. “If they want to use this money to buy an apartment, we will conduct careful due diligence and use tools such as Elliptic’s blockchain analysis tools to evaluate the wallet in question.”
If Brighty’s compliance team is satisfied with the source of this cryptocurrency, the funds will be accepted and the customer will also get a fiat account in their name.
“Then you just make the payment. The seller can be a lawyer or the owner of the apartment. And the money that comes to the seller comes from the customer, not from Blighty. It doesn’t come from our bank. Money can’t just come from, say, Binance or Kraken.”
The advantage of using cryptocurrencies to purchase a home is that it is faster and less complex than using traditional methods such as SWIFT, the global interbank payment instructions network used by over 11,000 banks. For example, if a buyer wants to exchange a stablecoin such as USDC for euros, it makes sense to replace SWIFT rails for domestic remittances, Denisenko said.
new trends
The Brighty team also observed an interesting shift in the choice of stablecoin used for large-scale transfers, which was typically Circle’s USDC.
Euro-pegged stablecoins are now preferred among wealthy customers instead to avoid conversion costs.
The cryptocurrency broker saw its average euro-backed trade size jump from 15,785 euros ($18,385) in Q3 to 59,894 euros ($69,762) in Q4 as wealthy individuals chose to execute large trades in Circle’s EURC instead of USDC.
“Recently, we have started to see customers using euro stablecoins who may have previously used USDC,” Denisenko said. “Why? Because if you deposit in USDC and buy something in Europe, there are exchange costs. Therefore, it is more convenient to use EURC, which eliminates the need for exchange rates.”
Looking ahead to the new year, Denisenko said his company is currently in a number of discussions with real estate agents to get them on board with the concept of buying apartments with transparent and legally acquired crypto assets.
“Our wealthy clients just want to de-risk the assets in their portfolio by investing some of their money in real estate,” he said.