New Federal Rule Mandates Lenders Count Crypto Assets for Mortgage Qualification

The American Homeowner Crypto Modernization Act of 2025 is aiming to change how lenders look at your wealth when you apply for a mortgage. Essentially, this bill mandates that federal agencies running major mortgage programs must update their rules to include the value of your digital assets—meaning your crypto holdings—when calculating your creditworthiness for a home loan.

Within 24 months of this act becoming law, agencies like HUD (FHA loans), the VA, the USDA, and the FHFA (which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) have to overhaul their underwriting guidelines. This means if you have Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other tokens sitting in a crypto exchange brokerage account, lenders participating in these federal programs will be required to factor that value into your application. The goal is clear: modernize the mortgage process to reflect how a growing number of people hold their wealth. A “digital asset” is broadly defined as any value recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger, like a blockchain.

Your Crypto Portfolio Just Got a Seat at the Closing Table

For years, if you were sitting on a significant amount of wealth in crypto, mortgage lenders often treated it like Monopoly money. They wanted to see cash, stocks, bonds, or retirement funds—the traditional, low-volatility stuff. This bill changes that, which is great news for the crypto-native generation trying to buy their first home. If you’ve been saving for a down payment primarily in digital assets, this bill forces lenders to acknowledge that value when assessing your ability to pay back a loan. This could potentially open the door to homeownership for people who might otherwise struggle to meet traditional asset requirements.

The Volatility Question: Risk and Reward

While this sounds like a win for modernization, the devil is in the details—or rather, the lack thereof. The bill requires lenders to “look at the value” of these assets, but it doesn't specify how they should be valued. This is a huge ambiguity, especially when dealing with assets that can lose 20% of their value in a single day. Think about it: a lender approves you based on a crypto portfolio worth $100,000, but by the time you close, it's worth $60,000.

The agencies have two years to figure this out, and how they define the valuation rules will determine whether this is a genuine benefit or a source of major headaches. If they adopt very conservative valuation methods—say, only counting 50% of the current market value to account for volatility—it might not help as much as enthusiasts hope. On the flip side, if they are too aggressive, it could introduce significant risk into the mortgage market, potentially leading to more instability down the road for both borrowers and the financial system.

The Compliance Clock is Ticking

This mandate creates an immediate compliance burden for federal agencies and, consequently, all the lenders who work with them. Within 24 months, these massive systems need to be overhauled to safely and reliably integrate highly volatile, non-traditional assets into their risk models. Lenders will have to develop new internal processes for verifying ownership, tracking asset fluctuations, and managing the risks associated with assets that aren't governed by the same regulations as traditional securities. While this is necessary for financial modernization, the cost and complexity of this system update will inevitably be passed down, potentially affecting application fees or interest rates.