US Mulls Whether Crypto Holdings Should Affect Mortgages

Federal housing regulators will examine whether cryptocurrency holdings should affect Americans’ mortgage applications.

In a Monday (June 23) post on social platform X, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Putle said his department will review how crypto assets might be included in the income checks by entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We will study the usage pf cryptocurrency holdings as it relates to qualifying for mortgages.

— Pulte (@pulte) June 24, 2025

Pulte’s comments were flagged in a Tuesday (June 24) report by CoinDesk, which said they came as the United States has become more welcoming to the cryptocurrency sector under President Donald Trump.

Pulte owns up to $1 million in cryptocurrency and holds stakes in crypto firm MARA Holdings and Elon Musk’s X, the report said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require that virtual currency only be used for “closing and reserves if it has been exchanged into U.S. dollars and is held in a U.S.- or state-regulated financial institution. There must be sufficient documentation to verify that the funds originated from the borrower’s cryptocurrency account.”

Meanwhile, there is a “rise of bitcoin as a form of collateral in loans issued by big banks — used as inputs to determine applicants’ net worth and liquidity, and by extension, loan terms,” PYMMTS reported this month.

J.P. Morgan, for example, said earlier this month that it would start offering loans to clients, in which bitcoin ETFs would be used as collateral for retail and institutional loans. Goldman Sachs has been accepting bitcoin as loan collateral since at least 2022.

Elsewhere, MicroStrategy’s subsidiary MacroStrategy took out a $205 million term loan from Silvergate in 2022, a loan that was collateralized by $820 million in bitcoin. However, a look into the regulatory filing offers a glimpse of some of the risks that are inherent when using bitcoin (or bitcoin funds) as collateral.

“If the price of bitcoin drops such that the LTV ratio exceeds 50%, the borrower is required to either deposit additional bitcoin in the bitcoin account or prepay a portion of the loan such that the LTV ratio is reduced to 25% or less,” the filing said.