coindesk.com
About a year ago, Nikolay Denisenko, a former lead backend engineer at European fintech firm Revolut, began to formalize a process whereby “special customers” of his new crypto payments app, Brighty, could use their digital assets to buy real estate.
Since then, demand has exploded.
Brighty has brokered over 100 deals so far for wealthy customers of the Lithuania-licensed platform, enabling them to buy apartments with crypto, with many more in the pipeline. Residential real estate purchases are mostly made in destinations such as the UK, France, Malta, Cyprus, and Andorra, Denisenko said.
“We have between 100 and 150 wealthy customers, and it’s growing fast,” said Denisenko, Co-Founder & CTO at Brighty App in an interview. “The average spend for these people is around $50,000 per month. The upper bound, in terms of a use case, is buying apartments in Europe. The size of these transactions varies from around $500,000 to about $2.5 million.”
The trend is another telling signal of crypto emulating traditional finance, where wealthy investors often like to de-risk their portfolios by investing some of their liquid assets in the safe haven of hard assets, such as real estate.
It’s no surprise that there’s a demand to cater to wealthy crypto holders looking to make large-scale purchases, given that banks shy away from such transactions. In 2025, the number of global crypto millionaires surged by a remarkable 40% in 12 months to 241,700, according to the Crypto Wealth Report 2025.
A longstanding concern about crypto has been the idea that digital assets could easily be used to launder the proceeds of crime.
However, Denisenko pushed back on the legitimacy of banks' hesitance, telling CoinDesk that sophisticated blockchain analytics tools can be used to perform sufficient due diligence on customer funds. He noted that most traditional financial institutions would likely be spooked by crypto when it comes to assessing the source of funds needed to buy a house
“The starting point is these investors hold crypto, and that can scare banks, even though these people have earned this wealth very transparently from Bitcoin, for example,” Denisenko said. “If they want to use this money to buy an apartment, we do careful due diligence and use things like Elliptic’s blockchain analysis tools to assess the wallets in question.”
Provided Brighty’s compliance team is satisfied with the source of this crypto, the funds are accepted, and the customer also gets a fiat currency account in their name.
“Then it’s just doing a payout. The seller can be either a lawyer or the apartment owner, and the money that comes to the seller is coming from the customer, not from Brighty; it's not coming from our bank. The money cannot just come from the likes of Binance or Kraken, for instance.”
The advantage of using crypto to buy a house is that it’s faster and less complex than using a traditional method, such as SWIFT, the global interbank payment instruction network used by over 11,000 banks. If the buyer converts a stablecoin, such as USDC, into euros, for instance, it makes sense to replace the SWIFT rails for local transfers, Denisenko said.
A new trend
The Brighty team has also observed an interesting shift in the choice of stablecoin used for large transfers, which had typically been Circle’s USDC.
Now, the preference among wealthy customers is for a euro-pegged stablecoin instead to avoid conversion costs.
The crypto broker saw a surge in average euro-backed transaction sizes, up from €15,785 ($18,385) in Q3 to €59,894 ($69,762) in Q4, as high-net-worth individuals chose to execute large deals in Circle’s EURC rather than USDC.
“Recently, we have started seeing our customers using euro stablecoins where previously they might have used USDC,” Denisenko said. “Why? Because if you deposit in USDC and you are buying something in Europe, you have a conversion cost. So it’s more convenient to use EURC because you remove any exchange rate.”
Looking ahead into the new year, Denisenko said his firm is now involved in numerous conversations with estate agencies, getting them on board with the concept of buying apartments with transparent and legitimately gained crypto holdings.
“Our wealthy customers are simply looking to de-risk the assets in their portfolio by putting some of their money into real estate,” he said.