Trump’s Crypto Cabinet Tag Team Mortgage Payments with Fannie Mae

Crypto spent an estimated $245–$250 million across the 2024 election cycle, more than oil and gas, pharma, and Citadel combined per OpenSecrets, and this week it started collecting. Better Home & Finance and Coinbase announced a mortgage product that lets borrowers pledge crypto as collateral for a Fannie Mae-conforming loan, a first in U.S. housing finance. Simultaneously, the White House wrapped up its review of a Labor Department rule that would open Americans' 401(k)s to Bitcoin. For anyone surprised or terrified, the spending figures above are your explanation.
WHAT HAPPENED
This is a genuinely historic structural shift in U.S. housing finance, which makes what follows all the more worth paying attention to.
Barely three years ago, Bitcoin and crypto were viewed by Congress, the SEC, and really the majority of the United States as a scam. The FTX implosion, courtesy of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering after stealing $8 billion from customers, all but wrecked the industry's reputation until BlackRock filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF on June 15, 2023. Since then, everyone from BlackRock to Fidelity to President Trump has jumped on board, giving public companies like Coinbase the political pull they need to partner with a Fannie Mae-approved mortgage firm and pull something like this off.
The product, appropriately named "Token-Backed Mortgage" (probably to avoid triggering anxiety in potential buyers), allows borrowers to use Bitcoin and USDC as collateral to fund their cash down payment and secure a standard conforming mortgage without liquidating their crypto or potentially triggering a taxable event. There are two loans here: one from Fannie Mae in the form of a standard conforming mortgage for the house itself, and a separate, privately financed loan from Better Home used to fund the down payment, either in Bitcoin or USDC. Crucially, even if Bitcoin price drops, Better Home can never liquidate your Bitcoin or USDC. The only scenario where liquidation becomes a risk is a 60-day payment delinquency. The presser does not say whether borrowers can combine both assets for the loan. Naturally, this is also a nice deal for Coinbase and its "Coinbase One" members, who get a 1% rebate on the mortgage amount, capped at $10,000, to cover closing costs and fees.
Genuinely historic, but also genuinely concerning, because everyone in this deal, especially Coinbase, should know by now that Bitcoin and crypto go down a lot.
WHY IT MATTERS
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The biggest red flag here is what happens when the collateral declines in value and a customer crosses the 60-day mark. Fannie Mae, backed by the federal government, can support Better Home on the conforming mortgage. That part is relatively normal, though neither Better Home nor Coinbase has disclosed a fixed split. It could be 80/20, it could be 50/50. We don't know. What we do know is that Better Home now has a separate credit exposure whose repayment depends on Bitcoin or USDC collateral rather than borrower cash flow. Economically, Better Home is not holding Bitcoin. It's holding a loan on Coinbase where Bitcoin happens to be the collateral, and that collateral may be worth much, much less by the time Better Home needs it. If someone puts up $200,000 of Bitcoin and Bitcoin drops 80% and Better is forced to liquidate, they have $40,000.
This matters because the second loan is privately financed, and Better Home's broader funding stack runs on three unnamed warehouse lines totaling $575 million, essentially short-term credit facilities, per a Yahoo Finance report from March 13, 2026. If Bitcoin drops, the initial loan doesn't shrink, only the collateral does. Those lenders could theoretically pull the plug with very little notice if Bitcoin starts nuking, leaving Better Home with weakened loans and funding sources that might not stick around to find out how it ends.
There is one more backer worth knowing about, interestingly not mentioned in the Coinbase/Better Home presser: a little-known crypto venture firm named Framework Ventures. On February 24, 2026, they announced $500 million in financing through the Sky stablecoin ecosystem, which uses crypto-native collateral to issue stablecoins, specifically its own stablecoin, USDS. Framework also bought about 10% of Better's stock, currently priced at around $45 million, back in February before its run-up to a 12-month high of $94.06.
WHAT'S NEXT
All of this gets worse when you look at Better Home's latest earnings. Two weeks ago they reported revenue of approximately $44 million for Q4 2025 against a net loss of approximately $40 million. They have literally no margin for error, and yet here they are, leaning on unnamed warehouse lines and tangling themselves up with Bitcoin loans in the middle of an escalating war in the Middle East.
What could go wrong?
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