Crypto Mortgages Are Having a Moment as Coinbase Jumps In

Crypto has spent years trying to break into the real world. Now, it’s knocking on the front door of the American housing market.

With new partnerships between Coinbase and Better Home & Finance enabling homebuyers to use Bitcoin as collateral — and even whispers of deeper involvement from Fannie Mae — crypto mortgages are no longer a niche experiment.

But for Milo CEO Josip Rupena, this moment isn’t new. It’s validation.

“I think it's it's great to see more traction, to see more momentum around the category,” Rupena, who has offered crypto mortgages at his startup since 2022, told Coinage. “People can buy a home if they have Bitcoin and they don't have to sell it.”

That idea — don’t sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it — is now moving from crypto-native startups into the core of the U.S. financial system.

For years, crypto wealth has lived in a kind of financial limbo. Valuable, but often unusable in traditional underwriting. Even as Bitcoin ETFs brought institutional capital into crypto, banks and mortgage lenders largely ignored it when assessing borrowers.

That’s starting to change.

The new Coinbase-Better structure effectively splits the mortgage into two parts: A traditional home loan and a crypto-backed loan used for the down payment. It’s a bridge between old finance and new — one that still requires borrowers to qualify under conventional rules. And that’s exactly where Rupena sees the gap.

“This announcement really is more of a, you can qualify conventionally and you can get a second loan,” he said. “But you're still going to have to qualify conventionally, which we've learned that for a lot of our clients that have Bitcoin, that might be tough.”

Milo has been trying to solve that problem for years, building mortgage products specifically for borrowers whose wealth is concentrated in crypto. Instead of forcing borrowers to sell Bitcoin — or prove income in dollars — Milo’s approach centers on collateral. In its most popular structure, users can finance the entire home purchase by pledging Bitcoin, avoiding a traditional down payment altogether.

“We knew that we needed to finance 100% of the transaction,” Rupena explained. “Customers don't put any money down because they generally don't have a lot of dollars. They're heavily weighted towards Bitcoin.”

The pitch then is simple: Unlock homeownership without triggering taxes or losing exposure to an asset many still believe will outperform everything else.

And so far, there’s demand. Milo has processed more than $100 million in crypto mortgage transactions, according to Rupena. But bringing crypto into housing isn’t just a product problem — it’s a regulatory one.

Despite the recent headlines, Fannie Mae — the backbone of the U.S. mortgage market — has yet to formally incorporate crypto into its underwriting standards.

“We'd like to see something clearly come from Fannie,” Rupena said. “Nothing about this announcement actually looped them in.” Until those rules evolve, crypto will remain an edge case rather than a core input.

Still, for those with larger crypto holdings, the savings of avoiding taxable events can stack up.

“The clients that have worked with ... in aggregate, they have $100 million more of net worth today because they didn't sell their Bitcoin,” Rupena said, noting that Coinbase stepping into the mortgage space is more exciting than it is having to worry about more competition.

“I think the holy grail for a lot of us is not just being able to create copies of existing financial products, but to be able to create better versions of these financial products,” Rupena said.

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