Hundreds of wealthy investors are using crypto to buy real estate in Europe
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.
