Christie’s Real Estate Launches Crypto Division Despite Systemic Payment Frictions

You get what you pay for.

In luxury real estate, that might just mean getting a mansion in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Christie’s International Real Estate established a dedicated crypto transactions division, becoming the first major luxury brokerage to support fully crypto-native property deals without fiat conversion or reliance on traditional banks, The New York Times reported Thursday (July 24).

The new unit will bring together crypto-native legal counsel, analysts and technologists to handle deals where buyers and sellers wish to transact entirely in digital assets. At the core of the strategy is closing deals without banks, using blockchain for title transfers, and accommodating privacy-seeking buyers looking to convert volatile digital holdings into tangible assets.

Luxury real estate deals have historically involved layers of banks, lawyers, escrow agents and regulators. Crypto could help eliminate many of these intermediaries.

The Christie’s news is happening at the same time as Square is letting merchants on its network accept bitcoin payments.

Beneath the surface of these payment experiments lies a familiar paradox, however. While crypto promises frictionless, peer-to-peer, global transactions, the lived experience for most users remains anything but smooth.

As Christie’s and Main Street merchants step into the fray, their moves underscore the opportunity and the messiness of a still-maturing system, where friction in crypto payments can often outweigh efficiencies.

Read also: Going From Zero to Crypto: How Banks and PSPs Can Approach Stablecoins

The Hidden Cost of Crypto’s ‘Simple’ Payments

Despite a steady stream of technological breakthroughs and multibillion-dollar investments, mainstream crypto user adoption remains elusive. One core reason is that crypto still suffers from persistent, systemic friction points in payments and usability that even the slickest user interfaces can’t paper over.

At first glance, crypto appears more accessible than ever. With custodial wallets, near-instant fiat onramps, wallet abstractions that allow users to sign in with a Google account, and gasless transactions in some ecosystems, the experience seems to be improving. But these user experience Band-aids often mask deeper structural flaws — and, in many cases, can introduce new risks that may alienate the very users they aim to attract.

The holy grail of crypto payments, for shoppers, is a digital wallet so intuitive that your grandmother could use it to buy a coffee. To get there, developers have layered on wallet abstractions — tools that hide blockchain complexity from end users. These include social logins, smart contract accounts and meta-transactions (where someone else pays your gas fee). While these tools reduce friction, they also push complexity downstream, shifting control from users to infrastructure providers.

This trade-off becomes more problematic when something goes wrong. With custodial wallets, users rely on third parties to safeguard their assets. If a platform is hacked or goes bankrupt, as FTX and Celsius notoriously did, users can lose access to their money.

Another issue is cross-chain fragmentation. The crypto ecosystem is spread across dozens of blockchains — Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and newer entrants like Sui and Aptos. Each has its own wallet formats, consensus mechanisms, and token standards. Moving assets between chains typically involves bridges, which are not only cumbersome but also frequently targeted by hackers.

Until there’s a universal standard or dominant platform, the average merchant or shopper must navigate a fragmented and risky landscape. Crypto-native tools like smart contracts are promising but legally murky. What jurisdiction governs a smart contract dispute? What recourse exists if a transaction fails?

See also: Blockchain Interoperability Hits the Right Note for Crypto Payments

A Band-Aid Approach to Broken Bones

The irony is that many of the UX innovations in crypto, such as custodial wallets, fiat onramps and embedded user flows, may ultimately be less about improving the underlying infrastructure and more about masking its potential dysfunctions.

This isn’t to downplay the value of better UX. Onboarding flows, educational content and intuitive interfaces are critical. But equally critical may be pairing them with real improvements in infrastructure, like lower fees, better interoperability, regulatory clarity and stronger consumer protections.

High fees, fragmented infrastructure, price volatility, regulatory ambiguity and weak consumer protections are foundational problems that require foundational solutions.

An underappreciated friction point is taxation. In the United States, every crypto transaction — including swapping one token for another or making a purchase — can trigger a taxable event. Users must track cost basis, capital gains and holding periods, often with little institutional support.

Until tax policy evolves to accommodate crypto’s unique characteristics, friction will remain high.

Additionally, trust must be built. Traditional finance systems come with consumer protection measures, like FDIC insurance, chargebacks and fraud alerts. In crypto, the ethos is code is law, and if you lose your keys or fall for a phishing scam, you’re on your own.