Milo Built a Mortgage for People Rich in Bitcoin and Poor on Paper

The modern mortgage application has a peculiar talent: it can make a rich person look broke. Put a seven-figure Bitcoin wallet beside a thin W-2, irregular founder income, or a foreign credit file and the conventional underwriting machine often stares at the paperwork, not the wealth. Milo exists because founder Josip Rupena kept meeting people who could afford U.S. real estate but could not fit themselves into the boxes a bank wanted checked.

The Miami company did not begin with a crypto slogan. Founded in 2018, it first built digital mortgages for international buyers - people with money, properties in mind, and no familiar U.S. credit history. By 2021 Milo said it had processed $400 million in applications from 62 countries. That first wedge taught the team a useful lesson: “unbankable” sometimes means “the bank is reading the wrong evidence.”

Then customers supplied the next product brief. Crypto holders were asking for loans without first selling the Bitcoin or Ethereum that made them wealthy. Selling could create a tax bill, end their exposure to future gains, and violate the most deeply held article of Bitcoin faith: do not part with the coins. Milo recognized the same old underwriting failure wearing a hoodie.

A house loan with a second pile of collateral

Milo's flagship crypto mortgage, launched in 2022, is a 30-year, fixed-rate, interest-only loan. A borrower can pledge Bitcoin or Ethereum equal to the mortgage amount and seek financing for as much as 100 percent of a U.S. property's purchase price. The house secures the mortgage, as houses do. The crypto also sits behind the deal, replacing the cash down payment and doing much of the qualification work.

The arrangement does not turn Bitcoin into legal tender at the closing table. Mortgage payments still arrive in U.S. dollars through ACH. The borrower still needs an appraisal, title work, insurance, and the means to make monthly payments. What changes is the lender's view of collateral and qualification. Milo publishes mortgage rates around 7 to 9 percent, subject to the borrower and structure, and says fees generally run 2 to 4 percent of the loan amount.

The interest-only structure keeps the scheduled monthly payment lower than a fully amortizing loan at the same rate. It also leaves the principal sitting there, calmly refusing to disappear. That balance must eventually be paid through sale, refinance, extra payments, or payoff. Some mortgage contracts may carry prepayment restrictions for up to three years, though Milo says borrowers can prepay 20 percent of original principal annually without a fee. This is flexible debt, not disappearing debt.

The paperwork broke before the customer did

Rupena had worked with international clients in private banking at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He saw people with substantial assets struggle to get a mortgage because they lacked U.S. income or credit history. Milo's first answer was not a token or a chain. It was a fully digital application and an underwriting process designed for foreign nationals.

That origin matters because it explains what changed the company's mind. Milo did not abandon one market after a failed experiment. It followed a repeating pattern from global buyers to crypto holders: qualified people were being misclassified by a legacy system. Customer requests made the crypto product feel less like a speculative detour and more like an extension of the original job.

“Our customers were asking us for this kind of solution.”Josip Rupena, describing the move into crypto mortgages

The timing was spicy. Milo launched just before the crypto-lending industry's 2022 parade of collapses. Celsius, BlockFi and others made “lend us your coins” sound less like financial innovation and more like the opening line of a cautionary tale. Milo's response was to emphasize the habits of mortgage lending: licensing, audits, collateral controls, and separations between the lender and the custodian.

Pledged assets go to Coinbase Custody or BitGo, where Milo says they are held in segregated cold-storage arrangements. Milo says it does not rehypothecate them - industry language for taking the customer's collateral and using it elsewhere. The company announced SOC 2 Type II certification in 2024. Those measures do not remove counterparty, operational, or contract risk. They reveal which fear Milo decided it had to answer first.

Custody is where product design becomes psychology

For a committed Bitcoiner, handing over keys can feel like buying a fireproof safe and mailing someone else the combination. Milo's original product requires custody because the crypto is collateral. Its newer self-custody mortgage takes the opposite bargain: the borrower keeps BTC or ETH in a verifiable wallet and uses it as reserves, not pledged collateral. In exchange, the borrower brings fiat and financing tops out at a published 75 percent of property value.

The split is smart product packaging. One customer wants maximum purchasing power and will transfer coins for it. Another values control more than leverage and will bring a down payment. Milo serves both without pretending those preferences are the same. A third group only wants dollars for a renovation, business investment, or another purchase; Milo offers a shorter crypto-backed loan, with published rates starting around 8.75 percent and a 2 percent origination fee.

This is also how the business makes money. Milo originates and services debt, earning interest and fees. It raised a $6 million seed round in 2021 and a $17 million Series A led by M13 in 2022, with QED Investors and MetaProp participating. Investors were backing a regulated lending operation with a software front end, not a fee-free protocol floating in cyberspace.

Steal the wedge, not the owl

Milo's transferable idea is not “add crypto.” It is to look for the customer who is plainly valuable but structurally illegible. Every legacy industry has one: the profitable small business with lumpy revenue, the immigrant with a thin local file, the creator with millions of fans and no predictable paycheck. The old system rejects them because its proxy for quality has drifted away from quality itself.

The other lesson is less glamorous: a financial product has to explain what happens on the worst Tuesday, not just the best decade. Milo says it has issued no mortgage margin calls, even through major Bitcoin drawdowns. Its current materials describe notifications and time to add collateral or reduce principal if a contract threshold is reached. The self-custody version avoids that crypto-liquidation mechanism because the coins are reserves rather than collateral.

The model will not work for everyone. If a borrower can obtain a much cheaper conventional mortgage, plans to sell the crypto anyway, cannot tolerate third-party custody, lacks dollar cash flow for payments, or has no credible plan for the principal, Milo may solve the wrong problem. A tax professional also needs to confirm the consequences; pledging is generally treated differently from selling, but individual facts matter.

Competition is arriving from several directions. Traditional non-QM lenders already serve borrowers outside agency standards. Figure and Ledn explored crypto-backed home finance. Better and Coinbase announced a Fannie Mae-eligible product in 2026, while other lenders have begun counting certain digital assets in qualification. The market is moving toward Milo's original observation: crypto wealth is real enough that underwriting must learn to see it.

Milo reported more than $100 million in crypto-mortgage originations by February 2026, including a $12 million transaction. That remains small beside America's enormous mortgage market, and that is the point. Milo sits in a narrow but revealing seam between private banking, non-QM mortgages, and crypto lending. It does not need every homebuyer. It needs the ones whose balance sheets make perfect sense everywhere except the application form.

The product is not a house bought with Bitcoin. It is a mortgage willing to admit that Bitcoin exists.YesPress