Last summer, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Bill Pulte, made a bombshell announcement that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would begin drafting underwriting guidelines for cryptocurrency-backed mortgage loans.

“After significant studying, and in keeping with President Trump’s vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the Great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage,” Pulte wrote in a June 25 post on the social media platform X.

He also shared a signed document amounting to an internal executive order formally directing the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to draft proposals for including cryptocurrency assets when conducting risk assessments for single-family loans.

Fannie and Freddie’s current guidelines mandate that cryptocurrencies need to be liquidated into U.S. dollars before they can be considered for mortgage risk assessments. Pulte’s directive calls for cryptocurrencies to be considered a stand-alone reserve asset, though it is uncertain which types of crypto assets may be approved or if they would be subject to specific valuation haircuts.

“Crypto adoption for mortgages is rapidly increasing since Federal Housing expressed commitment to it. It has been a big win,” said an FHFA spokesperson in response to Scotsman Guide’s request for updated information on the progress of these proposals.

“Digital assets are part of modern household balance sheets.”

It is unclear to what extent Fannie and Freddie have acted in response to Pulte’s internal order, and industry sources tell Scotsman Guide that little additional chatter from the GSEs has followed. However, mortgage lenders across all production channels are intent on building pathways for an expanding pool of borrowers, who are generating income and wealth through digital assets, to find their way into a home loan.

“That directive reflects growing recognition that digital assets are part of modern household balance sheets,” explains Bob Johnson, head of originations at Newrez, which announced at the end of 2025 that it would be launching a crypto-backed mortgage program.

The FHFA announcement was significant, too, because it flashed what Johnson describes as a “meaningful signal coming from Washington” that the capital markets apparatus supporting one-half to two-thirds of the U.S. mortgage market would help standardize a broader shift in how investors assign risk to crypto-backed assets.

Newrez is owned by investment firm Rithm Capital, which has roughly $53 billion in assets under management, according to the firm’s website. Johnson tells Scotsman Guide that “meaningful developments” in liquidity, institutional adoption and regulatory clarity have reinforced that “crypto is here to stay” in mortgage lending.

He says Newrez has been in “active dialogue with industry stakeholders,” such as ratings agencies, to share how digital assets are being verified, valued and governed within existing credit frameworks.

“The cues we’re hearing are that discipline matters,” Johnson specifies, citing “clear custody, [anti-money laundering] compliance, transparent valuation, conservative treatment of volatility and performance through market cycles” as key areas of focus for secondary markets.

The Newrez executive says the global crypto market capitalization now stands around $2.4 trillion, compared to around $1 trillion three years ago. Approximately 45% of Gen Z and millennial investors hold crypto, he adds, “creating clear demand for mortgage solutions that recognize digital assets as part of a borrower’s financial profile.”

“Consumers with eligible digital assets can qualify for a mortgage without liquidating their holdings and use it for income qualification,” says Johnson, “allowing crypto to be recognized in a manner similar to traditional investment assets like stocks.”

Volatility questions

The argument against including cryptocurrencies in mortgage underwriting is that crypto assets have historically been more volatile than the stocks, bonds, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) commonly found in brokerage accounts.

“During periods of traditional market stress, crypto assets can be as volatile as traditional assets, and during periods of crypto stress, these assets are much more volatile than traditional assets,” wrote the authors of a 2024 study of digital assets by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Those volatility concerns led four Democratic senators, led by Jeff Merkley of Oregon, to send a letter to Pulte in July of last year, cautioning that “expanding underwriting criteria to include the consideration of unconverted cryptocurrency assets could pose risks to the stability of the housing market and the financial system.”

In underwriting cryptocurrencies’ track record of volatility, Johnson says “market‑adjusted valuations” reflect each asset’s historical performance and liquidity profile, with the ultimate goal of bringing digital assets “more in line with how established investments like stocks have long been incorporated into mortgage qualification.”

Johnson says Newrez has intentionally limited approved crypto assets to “highly liquid, widely adopted cryptocurrencies.” This includes bitcoin and ethereum plus ETFs backed by those cryptocurrencies, as well as U.S. dollar‑backed stablecoins. He says assets must be held in U.S.-regulated crypto exchanges and retail platforms or federally regulated brokerages and nationally chartered banks.

Other lenders who have recently launched crypto-backed mortgage programs are positioning for a first-mover advantage against whatever GSE frameworks develop.

“We see crypto-mortgages as an early but inevitable evolution in how underwriting reflects modern balance sheets,” says Kate Amor, head of enterprise products at Rate, which recently launched a product that does not require borrowers to liquidate crypto holdings in order to qualify with them as reserve assets and income.

“Our view is that the progress in this category is proven in the market first,” adds Amor, “through disciplined execution, and then later it’ll be codified more broadly.”

Nevertheless, as an expanding demographic of current and prospective mortgage borrowers builds wealth, stores savings and conducts transactions using digital assets, Pulte’s announcement has signaled that an opportunity has emerged to be the cart that the market will eventually position before the regulatory horse.

“Rather than waiting for frameworks to catch up, we want to operate where innovation already exists,” explains Amor, citing financial technology that has enabled non-agency, private-label securitization markets to thrive in recent years, “and then apply institutional custody standards, conservative underwriting and volatility awareness.”

To that end, Amor says it is Rate’s intention to develop a digital asset product category that will eventually lack the novelty and volatility it possesses today — not to overstretch underwriting guidelines that regulators may ultimately snap back.

“We started working on this to come up with something responsible that made sense,” explains Amor, “so that the only piece that felt unusual was the crypto. It’s a conservative non-QM product.”

Walk, don’t run

John Wise, head of national production for Newfi, a non-qualified mortgage (non-QM) lender that announced crypto-backed mortgage products in February, says non-agency shops for at least five years have been “trying to figure out whether or not it’s an asset that we can use somehow to help more people get houses.”

“A big portion of U.S. consumers are investing in crypto assets,” says Wise, who estimates that between 50 million and 70 million people own crypto-related assets either through direct ownership in digital wallets or ETFs. “That’s more than the self-employed borrower community,” he adds, a core market for most non-QM lenders.

The Trump administration’s focus on mainstreaming digital assets has increased traction for the idea of lending against crypto holdings for mortgages, he says, but recent fluctuations in crypto markets accentuate the volatility that even vocal federal support can struggle to contain.

“They’ve come in and been really aggressive with policy, and you would think that the Trump administration policy play would create more stability, that you’re getting this general market acceptance of crypto as an asset by the Trump administration,” says Wise, “and then the market’s reaction to all of that is for crypto prices to crash again.”

As lenders, regulators and investors familiarize themselves with the risks and opportunities that await wider adoption of crypto-backed mortgage lending, Wise says lenders should remember that the scale of the opportunity is commensurate with the scale of crypto risks.

Newfi first allowed borrowers to use crypto holdings as reserves for debt-service coverage ratio rental investor loans “because DSCR just is a little bit more flexible in terms of that credit box,” says Wise. The company now offers crypto-oriented asset depletion options for investors and non-investors, as well as asset utilization loans for borrowers with large cash reserves, using valuation haircuts on crypto assets due to their volatility.

Like other lenders interviewed for this article, Newfi has adopted a walk-before-you-run approach that anticipates a broader market opportunity for expanding mortgage credit access to borrowers with a range of digital assets, from cryptocurrencies to much less volatile stablecoins benchmarked to hard assets or U.S. dollars.

“I think that will be a piece that will come into the underwriting guidelines sometime in the near future,” says Wise, noting the much wider adoption of digital assets among younger consumers, especially, who represent the next generation of mortgage demand.

“That’s another reason why we’re trying to get ahead of this,” he adds, “because this next phase of homeownership is going to come from that younger generation still kind of locked into the rental market and constantly looking for ways to qualify to buy a house.”