You Can Buy a House Without Selling Your Bitcoin Now, and the Collateral Terms Tell You What It Is Really Worth

There is no top up requirement. If bitcoin halves, you are not asked for more collateral, your rate does not move, and your loan terms do not change. Anyone who has been liquidated on a crypto backed loan at three in the morning will understand how unusual that is.

What can take your coins is much more ordinary. Fall 60 days delinquent on the payments and Better may liquidate the pledged bitcoin. So the risk in this structure is not volatility. It is unemployment, illness, divorce, or any of the other reasons people miss mortgage payments, and those risks are uncorrelated with your view on bitcoin.

What you give up

Custody, which for a certain kind of holder is the whole argument.

The pledged coins must sit with a regulated custodian. Self custodied cold storage does not qualify. A holder who has spent years learning to hold their own keys, for reasons we set out in the basics of self custody and in the practical security guide, is being asked to hand the keys to an exchange for the length of a thirty year mortgage in exchange for not paying capital gains tax today.

That is a coherent trade. It is not a small one, and it should not be presented as a technicality.

The exposure nobody is describing

You now hold a leveraged position in two assets at once, and they have a history of falling together.

Housing and bitcoin are both long duration risk assets that respond to the same thing: the price of money. In a liquidity squeeze, rates rise, house prices soften and crypto sells off, usually in that order and usually within the same few months. This structure gives a borrower concentrated exposure to both, funded by debt, at the same interest rate.

The no margin call term protects you from the middle of that scenario. It does not protect you from the end of it, where the house is worth less than the mortgage and the collateral is worth less than it was when you posted it, and the only thing that has not moved is the size of the payment.

Who this is actually for

Someone with a large unrealised gain, a stable income, and a genuine intention to keep the coins for decades.

For that person the maths is good. They convert a tax event into a financing cost and keep the upside. For anyone else, the 250 per cent requirement quietly makes the point: if you have to post two and a half dollars of bitcoin to move one dollar into a house, the constraint is that you do not have enough bitcoin for this to be the cheap route.

The larger significance is not the product. It is that the American mortgage system now has a documented internal price for bitcoin as collateral. Every regulatory argument we have followed, from the Clarity Act framework to Europe's MiCA regime, has been about what these assets legally are. This is the first time an institution has had to say, in a contract, what one is worth when things go wrong. The answer is forty cents.