Miami’s newest real estate amenity: turning crypto into keys

A $4 million crypto HODLer recently went shopping for a cheaper way to turn digital assets into dollars. He found one… in Singapore. Then he pictured sending $4 million overseas and simply hoping the dollars came back.

He returned to Miami-based CryptEscrow and paid its 1% fee.

That leap of faith, or the lack of one, sits at the heart of a new partnership between CryptEscrow and Aventura-based luxury brokerage Elite International Realty. Together, the companies want to make cryptocurrency-backed property purchases feel less like an experiment and more like a closing.

“I was trying for a long time to fin a way that people could pay in crypto,” Elite CEO Daniel Ickowicz told Refresh Miami. When a mutual contact introduced him to CryptEscrow founder John Ioannou [pictured above], the search ended. “Why reinvent the wheel?” Ickowicz said.

The wheel is more complicated than a quick Bitcoin sale. Retail exchange accounts impose transfer limits, and large withdrawals can trigger compliance reviews that stretch for days or weeks. Funds generally must first travel to the crypto owner’s bank account, where another review – or even an account freeze – may follow.

CryptEscrow instead verifies buyers, checks their wallets, converts their assets and wires dollars directly to escrow. Its institutional accounts can handle transactions from a million-dollar home to a $100 million development, Ioannou said, while identity verification can take about three minutes.