Congress quietly opens mortgage system to crypto collateral
S. 2471 — 21st Century Mortgage Act of 2025 · Filed by Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) · Introduced Jul 28, 2025 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill allows Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to count cryptocurrency holdings as part of a borrower's financial reserves when assessing mortgage risk, provided the digital assets are held by regulated custodians. Borrowers with crypto assets would no longer need to convert them to dollars to demonstrate financial capacity, though lenders must adjust for volatility and concentration risk.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core function is to amend federal mortgage charter law to permit digital assets as borrower reserves in mortgage risk assessment. It is neither a tax measure nor a commemorative act, but rather a regulatory carve-out for a specific asset class.
What the text implies
- Vague risk-adjustment standards ('any appropriate adjustment') may allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to set their own volatility thresholds without statutory guardrails, creating moral hazard if crypto crashes.
- The bill does not specify what happens to mortgage-backed securities if borrowers default due to crypto-asset depreciation; taxpayers may absorb losses on government-backed loans collateralized partly by speculative assets.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
cryptocurrency custodians and exchanges; mortgage lenders (reduced underwriting friction for crypto-wealthy borrowers); crypto-holding individuals seeking mortgages