RealOpen Certified · Lesson 5 of 8

Crypto and the mortgage

After this, you can tell which of four ways a financed buyer's crypto meets the loan, bring the lender and RealOpen together before anything is sold or moved, and explain why "sell it and wait sixty days" is usually the expensive answer.

After this lesson you can

  • Name the four ways crypto meets a mortgage: down payment, reserves, qualifying on assets, and collateral, and say which three RealOpen documents and which one it has no part in.
  • Explain sourcing versus seasoning, and why documented funds generally do not have to sit.
  • Describe the documentation chain from wallet to closing table: RealScore Report, Transaction Record, bank statement, contract.
  • Recognize the buyer with real crypto wealth and thin W-2 income, and the lender lane that fits.
  • Ask a loan officer the three questions, and say what RealOpen does not promise.

By Johnny Schiro, licensed real estate broker in Texas, New York and Florida. Updated 2026-10-10.

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RealOpen is not a lender

Start here, because everything else depends on it. RealOpen does not make, broker, arrange or fund loans, and it has no part in any loan secured by crypto. A financed buyer chooses their own lender, and that lender decides what it will accept. RealOpen's role on a financed deal is verification and documentation: it proves what the buyer holds, converts what is being converted, and produces the paper an underwriter can check. Call it RealOpen's crypto reserve asset verification when you are talking to a lender, and the RealScore Report when you are naming the document.

Your job is awareness, not underwriting. You do not need to know the guidelines. You need to know which conversation your buyer is in, and to get the right people talking before anything is sold or moved.

Four ways crypto meets a mortgage

How the crypto is usedWhat happensRealOpen's part
Down paymentCrypto is converted to dollars and wired to escrow. A traditional lender funds the restConverts and wires the funds, and documents them with a RealScore Report and a Transaction Record
ReservesThe lender counts holdings the buyer keeps after closing. Nothing is sold or pledgedVerifies the holdings in a RealScore Report. Whether they count is the lender's call
Qualifying on assetsAn asset depletion loan from a non-QM lender treats verified assets as incomeVerifies the holdings. The loan comes from the lender
CollateralA mortgage secured by pledged crypto. This is Route 2 in Module 2, a different product from a different kind of lenderNone

A buyer can be in more than one of the first three at once: a crypto down payment, with the rest of the holdings counted as reserves.

Two terms. Reserves are assets a borrower still has after closing, counted in months of the housing payment. They are shown, not spent. Asset depletion takes verified assets, applies a discount, divides the result over a set number of months and counts it as monthly income. It is the lane for a buyer with real wealth and no W-2.

Down payment: the documentation chain

On a conventional loan, the lender's written rule is simple: crypto counts for the down payment, closing costs and reserves once it has been converted to dollars, deposited at a regulated institution and verified. The hard part is not the rule. It is proving where the dollars came from.

Under Fannie Mae's guidelines, an underwriter must document the source of any single deposit larger than half the borrower's monthly qualifying income. A cash-out big enough for a down payment trips that rule every time. The lender then needs a chain it can follow:

  1. The RealScore Report. The buyer's verified identity and verified wallet, how and when ownership was proven, current holdings and their dollar value, and the holding history: when the assets first arrived and the balance at the end of each week across the review period.
  2. The Transaction Record. The conversion and the wire to escrow, with the on-chain transaction behind it.
  3. The closing statement and the contract, showing the dollars arriving where they were supposed to.

Together these take the lender from the wallet to the closing table without a gap. Every RealScore Report and Transaction Record carries a document ID and a QR code that anyone can check at realopen.com/verify.

On the route RealOpen runs, the down payment never passes through the buyer's bank account at all. It is converted at funding and wired to escrow, which removes the large-deposit question from the bank statement entirely. Lenders differ in how they treat funds wired directly to escrow by a third party, which is one of the three questions below.

Sourcing versus seasoning

Seasoning is the fallback, not the requirement. When a lender cannot document where funds came from, it makes them sit in a bank account, typically for 60 days and sometimes 90, until the question stops mattering. Funds that are sourced, meaning the ownership, the conversion and the path to escrow are all documented, generally do not have to sit. The lender decides, and some lenders will insist on seasoning whatever the documentation. Plenty of loan officers have never seen this and will reach for the rule they know.

Why "sell it now and let it season" is expensive advice

A loan officer who tells your buyer to sell everything today and wait sixty days is solving the lender's documentation problem with the buyer's money. Three things happen:

  • A taxable sale, months early, at whatever the price happens to be that day. The buyer may have wanted to hold.
  • Two months in cash while the search goes on, with no way back in if the market moves.
  • The large deposit lands on the bank statement anyway, and now it has to be explained with exchange records the buyer may or may not have kept.

Documented funds avoid all three. The buyer keeps the crypto until funding, the conversion happens once, and the lender gets a paper trail instead of a waiting period. That is why the sequence matters: lender and RealOpen first, selling and moving never, or last.

Conventional versus non-QM

Conventional (agency)Non-QM
Who it fitsA borrower with qualifying income who wants crypto for the down payment, closing costs or reservesA borrower whose wealth is in assets rather than income
Crypto for the down paymentAfter conversion to dollars, deposited and verified. Source the deposit, or convert at funding with a documented wireSame, with the lender's own documentation standards
Unsold crypto as reservesLender by lender. The written agency rule counts crypto once it is dollars; some lenders count verified holdings under their own overlaysCommonly counted when verified. Terms vary
Qualifying on the assets themselvesNoAsset depletion: verified assets, discounted, spread over the term, counted as income
What RealOpen providesRealScore Report, Transaction RecordRealScore Report, Transaction Record

Non-QM loans carry their own pricing and down payment requirements, and the lender writes its own rules for what counts and at what discount. None of that is yours to negotiate; your job is to know the lane exists.

Two buyers

Scenario one. A software engineer earning $240,000 holds $700,000 in Bitcoin and USDC in a hardware wallet and wants a $1.4 million home with a conventional loan. Her loan officer has never documented crypto and suggests she sell $300,000 and wait sixty days. Better sequence: she gets verified with RealOpen this week, the loan officer receives a RealScore Report, the down payment is converted at funding and wired to escrow with a Transaction Record, and her remaining holdings are documented for reserves if the lender will count them. She sells nothing early and the lender has a chain it can check.

Scenario two. A founder sold his company for tokens three years ago, holds about $3 million in Ether and Solana, and draws $60,000 a year. A conventional lender declines him on income. He is not an all-cash buyer, because he does not want to sell $1.2 million of crypto to buy a house. The lane is a non-QM lender with an asset depletion program, which treats his verified holdings as income. RealOpen's part is the RealScore Report that documents what he holds and for how long. The down payment can be a Route 4 conversion; the rest stays where it is.

When a buyer says, "I've got the money, I just don't have a paystub," that is scenario two.

The lender conversation

When a financed buyer mentions crypto, do two things before they sell or move anything.

First, bring RealOpen in: the buyer gets verified and a RealScore Report is requested early, so the lender is looking at a document rather than a description.

Second, have the buyer ask the loan officer three questions:

  1. What documentation do you accept for crypto assets?
  2. What holding period applies, if any, to converted funds?
  3. When do the funds have to be in U.S. dollars, and can they be wired directly to escrow at funding?

A loan officer who cannot answer them, or who answers "sell it and wait" to all three, may not be the right lender for this file. Suggesting the buyer talk to a second lender is ordinary advice, not a judgment.

What RealOpen does not promise

RealOpen does not promise that any lender will accept a buyer's crypto, count it as reserves, waive seasoning or close on a date. Acceptance depends on the loan product, the lender's guidelines and overlays, the custody arrangement, the asset, and the documentation. Say so to your buyer early. The credential tells people you can run this conversation competently, not that you can guarantee its outcome.

RealOpen Certified is a private designation issued by RealOpen. It is not continuing education credit and is not issued or endorsed by any state licensing authority. How certifying works.