How Fannie Mae's Crypto Mortgages Can Save You Thousands in Taxes
- Landon
- Apr 17
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 20
How does Fannie Mae structure this?
Fannie Mae is starting something revolutionary in the crypto world, and can help you buy a house in modern day America. Before we dive into this topic, Fannie Mae is not offering a crypto mortgage where you use crypto as a down payment. Instead, you can “pledge” your crypto assets as collateral for a second loan, which would ultimately cover the down payment. This does add a couple extra steps in the homebuying process, but the positives can help buffer out the second loan. The main reason for a consumer to buy a home this way is to save thousands of dollars in taxes.
How can this save you on your taxes?
When you pay for your down payment of your house the old way, you have to sell your digital assets out of your wallet. In a hypothetical situation let's say that you bought 20,000 dollars of Bitcoin in 2021 and now it is worth 100,000 dollars. You and your family are ready to buy a house, so you pull out the 100,000 dollars in order to cover the down payment. By the time March comes around, you are going to see a capital gains tax on that sale for the 80,000 dollar profit. Capital gains taxes are no joke, so you might be owing anywhere from 10-15 thousand dollars depending on your tax bracket.
Now let's enter Fannie Mae’s solution. The same person is going to pledge that bitcoin he owns to Fannie Mae as collateral. This does not trigger a capital gains tax because it is considered a non-realization event. Fannie Mae will have a partnered company like Coinbase or Better Home & Finance offer a loan, usually around 1% higher than a traditional mortgage, which you can pay off monthly. Although the interest rate is a little higher than the traditional method, you are saving up to 15,000 dollars in capital gains taxes. Depending on the price of the house and your down payment amount, this can be a premium way of buying a home instead of the traditional route.
Signing away your assets
If you are a homebuyer that owns digital assets, then this can be an amazing way for you to turn your digital currency liquid without paying taxes. Although this seems like a no-brainer, you have to look at how the collateral can affect your portfolio. Looking into the rules, Fannie Mae is only accepting two currencies at the moment, the USDC and Bitcoin. Another major thing that happens when you use it as collateral is that you are not allowed to touch it once you sign the contract. Your assets get locked and you can no longer trade, even if the market is doing extremely well.
There are a ton of positives and possible “cons” for homebuyers that you must balance to see if this is a good option for you. A trader who is constantly moving assets around probably would not benefit from this, but a family who just invested into bitcoin early on and didn't touch it could have the opportunity to leverage that asset to get them into their first home.
What if Bitcoin Crashes?
This is a huge question people will have going into this, because of the high volatility of Bitcoin in the market. In a traditional crypto loan, you might see a dip in the market, making these companies panic and have you add more collateral. With Fannie Mae, they are designed to hold high collateral and that will help buffer against price swings in the market. Your monthly payment will also always stay the same because the product was built to handle volatile markets.
April 17, 2026
