Christie's can use Crypto Assets to buy houses, a new milestone in the RWA track.

With Christie's International Realty accepting crypto purchases, the RWA track has reached a new milestone. This article explores how cryptocurrencies are injecting new liquidity and possibilities into the nearly $50 trillion U.S. real estate market through tokenization, mortgage lending, and more. (Synopsis: Bitcoin buys a mansion" Christie's opens a cryptocurrency real estate department, privacy and efficiency attract wealthy buyers) (Background supplement: Christie's provides NFT digital certificates for 132 auction items, can it become a new standard in the art market? With the addition of Crypto, playing real estate is like playing "Monopoly", "Buy land, they don't make land anymore." This is a famous quote mistaken for Mark Twain in the 20th century and frequently used in the field of real estate sales. Gravity strongly endorses this sentence, if humans cannot do interstellar travel, land will be "impossible to reissue" like Bitcoin. In 2025, as the crypto wave spreads from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and finally affects Washington, it also begins to quietly change the basic structure of the real estate industry as compliance progresses. In early July, Christie's International Real (Christie's International Real Estate) officially established an exclusive department for crypto real estate transactions, becoming the world's first mainstream luxury real estate brokerage brand that supports "pure digital currency payment for house purchase" in the whole process in the name of a company. And this is just the beginning, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Dubai developers, from Beverly Hills mansions in Los Angeles to rental apartments in Spain, a number of real estate trading platforms with blockchain technology and digital assets as the core are emerging, forming an emerging "Crypto Real Estate" track. Why Crypto Can Drive the Next Wave of U.S. Real Estate U.S. real estate is worth nearly $50 trillion in 2024, making it one of the world's most significant asset markets, up from about $23 trillion 10 years ago in 2014, doubling the size of assets in the sector in a decade. Overall U.S. real estate volume, Awealthofcommonsense analysis report The June 2025 NAR report shows that the median U.S. home price reached $435,300, up 2% from the same period last year. The housing stock is about 1.53 million units, and supply and demand are 4.7 months. High housing prices and chronic supply shortages have raised the threshold, coupled with the consistently high mortgage interest rate of about 6.75% in July (2025 30-year fixed interest rate, and Bitcoin mortgage is currently about 9%) Consistently higher than the annual rise in the value of the property, which inhibits transaction volume, and low liquidity makes property investors seek new sources of liquidity. And the high interest rate blocking Benutzerdefinierte is a low liquidity problem for real estate investors. Over the past five years, the average owner of a property has increased their wealth by $140,000. But in fact, many families are reluctant to use real estate loans to release liquidity when holding real estate assets, because their realization paths are generally only two, one is to sell the overall assets, the other is to rent, using real estate borrowing is not a good choice in the current interest rate, and selling in the case of rising house prices does not seem to be a better investment decision. Therefore, in the overall $50 trillion real estate sector, there are currently about 70% of the equity (34.98 trillion ) which is owned by the holder, which means that only 30% is backed by borrowed funds, and the rest is the buyer's own funds. For example, if a family owns a $500,000 property, although nominally they own the property, if they want to sell it, they also need to deduct the share of the loan to actually hold it, and they own $350,000 in the property at 70%. U.S. real estate equity holdings, source: Ycharts And supply and demand alone is not enough, the concept of RWA has been developed for many years but has only really begun to explode in the past two years, especially after Trump's election in 2025, the upward slope has further increased. Compliance is at its core, especially for investors in illiquid assets like real estate, and FHFA's new director, William Poulter, ordered mortgage giants Fannie Mae (Fannie Mae) and Freddie Mac to (Freddie in March 2025 Mac) Develop a scheme that allows crypto assets to be included in reserve assets when assessing the risk of single-family mortgages, without first converting to US dollars. This policy encourages banks to treat cryptocurrencies as assets that can be counted as savings, expanding the borrower base. IN JULY 2025, TRUMP SIGNED THE GENIUS ACT AND PUSHED FOR THE CLARITY ACT. The GENIUS Act recognizes stablecoins as legitimate digital currencies for the first time, requires stablecoins to be fully stocked 1:1 in safe assets such as US dollars or short-term government bonds, and mandicts third-party audits. The CLARITY Act seeks to clarify whether digital tokens are securities or commodities, providing a regulatory path for practitioners. These combinations make the field have a greater margin of safety, coupled with the scarce attribute of real estate similar to bitcoin's "cannot be issued" ( land cannot be increased, the property itself can, building a house is as ) as mining, making it easier to combine the two. Digitalization helps break down high barriers. Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, predicts in its Financial Sector Report that about $4 trillion in real estate could be tokenized by 2035, up from less than $300 billion in 2024. Tokenization can split large real estate into small shares, providing global investors with a low-threshold, high-liquidity way to participate, and creating cash flow for sellers and buyers who would otherwise lack capital. That being said, the $4 trillion figure sounds good, but it's as debatable as the agency's prediction that ETH's market capitalization will reach $85 trillion in the future, but how far has it grown? We may be able to find some alpha in the market. Fragmentation? Borrowing? Lease? Provide liquidity? Play real estate like DeFi Unlike similar entities with low liquidity such as gold and art, real estate comes with its own derived financial properties. After connecting to Crypto, it is more diversified. Although there have been attempts before, in 2018 the Harbor platform partnered with RealT to launch a blockchain-based real estate tokenization service, which is considered to be one of the earlier and more large-scale real estate tokenization projects. Specifically, the RealT platform splits property interests into tradable RealTokens through the blockchain. Each property is owned by a separate company (Inc/LLC), and the purchaser of RealToken is equivalent to holding a portion of the company's shares and enjoying a pro rata rental income. The platform uses Ethereum's authorized issuance mechanism to make the investment threshold low ( usually around $50 ), and transactions and rent issuance are completed on the chain, and investors do not need to bear the daily management of traditional landlords. RealT distributes rental income to holders weekly in the form of stablecoin (USDC or xDAI). The expected return comes from return on net assets (RONA), i.e. annual net rent / total investment in property. For example, when a property's expected annual rental income minus expenses is $66,096 and the total investment is $880,075, the RONA is 7.51%. This value does not include leverage or property...