Christie’s to conduct $1 billion in cryptocurrency real estate transactions

The auction house has been working with digital assets since 2021

Christie’s will allow buyers to purchase real estate using cryptocurrency

25.07.2025 - 14:50

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3 min

What’s new? British auction house Christie’s has formed a new cryptocurrency division, which includes industry experts, lawyers, and analysts. They will be engaged in facilitating transactions in which sellers and buyers will be able to work with cryptocurrency without involving banks.

Material by NYT

What else is known? Christie’s International Real Estate CEO Aaron Kirman said that the decision to launch a new division came after the company made several major real estate transactions using cryptocurrency.

One of the most notable was the purchase of a Beverly Hills home for $65 million in bitcoins.

Kirman noted that celebrities and the super-rich have long gone from buying real estate in their own names and using companies or trusts to do so, but now cryptocurrency transactions are gaining popularity among them, as the anonymity of blockchains makes it difficult to trace the transaction’s connection to the real buyer.

According to Kirman, Christie’s has been successful in protecting the buyer’s identity in crypto real estate transactions, and in some of them, even the seller didn’t know the buyer.

Christie’s will offer $1 billion worth of real estate for cryptocurrency transactions, including properties worth millions of dollars in Los Angeles.

Kirman is also in discussions with banks to launch cryptocurrency mortgage lending programs. He suggested that in five years, cryptocurrency will be used in more than a third of all residential real estate transactions.

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Christie’s has been offering non-fungible token (NFT) auctions since 2021, and in 2022, it launched an auction platform based on the Ethereum blockchain.

It dominates the auction house market alongside Sotheby’s, which is also actively using NFT and cryptocurrencies. Christie’s reported revenue of $5,7 billion last year, down 6% from 2023, while Sotheby’s earned $6 billion, down 23% from a year earlier.

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