Menu #15: The Mortgage Has Landed

BTC Mortgage
The Psychology of Money
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th June
Tokenised Assets: The Infrastructure Bet
Brand spice
Chef’s Note

This is The Menu: the UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing.

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

The industry is starting to look less like a series of disconnected experiments and more like a system finding its shape.

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

The dinner club is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

A Bitcoin-backed loan lets you borrow cash using your Bitcoin as collateral — without selling it. You keep your long-term price exposure while unlocking liquidity today.

How It Works

The Key Risk: Margin Calls & Liquidation

This is where most borrowers get caught out. Because Bitcoin's price fluctuates, your LTV ratio moves constantly.

Crypto-backed mortgages have been talked about for years.

Now one has actually landed inside the traditional US mortgage system.

Better Home & Finance and Coinbase have funded the first Fannie Mae-backed mortgage in the US secured by Bitcoin, with plans to roll the product out to qualified borrowers nationwide by summer 2026.

The product is designed for a very specific type of buyer: someone who qualifies on income and credit but does not have enough traditional cash for a down payment because part of their wealth sits in digital assets.

That is the important shift.

This is not crypto replacing the mortgage system.
It is crypto being recognised by the mortgage system.

Eligible borrowers can pledge assets such as Bitcoin and USDC held through Coinbase as collateral, rather than selling those holdings to raise cash. That means they may avoid liquidating long-term positions, potentially avoiding an immediate tax event and keeping exposure to future upside.

Better say this addresses a real gap in the market: 41% of its pre-approved customers qualify on income and credit but fall short on cash reserves for a traditional down payment.

That is where the product gets interesting.

For a younger generation that may have built wealth differently — in Bitcoin, stablecoins, equities, startups, side businesses or digital assets. The old underwriting model does not always reflect the full financial picture.

A 30-year mortgage was built for a world where savings sat in bank accounts, pensions, and predictable salary paths. But a growing number of buyers now hold wealth in places traditional mortgage systems were not designed to evaluate properly.

This product gives that wealth a route into housing finance without forcing a sale first.

There are caveats.

Crypto volatility still matters. Custody matters. Eligibility matters. Risk controls matter. This will not be a product for everyone, and the detail of collateral management will decide how far it can scale.

But as a signal, it is worth watching.

Because the bigger story is not “buying houses with Bitcoin”.

The bigger story is that digital assets are starting to become usable collateral inside mainstream financial products.

That is a much more serious phase of adoption.

W3DC takeaway: crypto’s next use case may not be spending it at the checkout. It may be using digital wealth as recognised collateral inside the existing financial system.

We have already reviewed Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money in a previous issue.

But after reading it again, it feels worth coming back to.

Not because the book suddenly changes, but because you probably do.

The first time you read it, the obvious lesson is that money is behavioural. Doing well with money is less about spreadsheets and more about patience, ego, fear, greed, luck, and knowing what “enough” looks like.

On a second read, the deeper point is this:

You need to build the right psychology around money before money starts testing you.

That matters for founders, investors, and operators.

Because money changes pressure.
It changes decision-making.
It changes risk appetite.
It changes how people define success.

Housel’s strongest idea is that no one is crazy. People make financial decisions based on their own lived experience. What looks irrational from the outside may make perfect sense to someone shaped by different risks, different losses, or different opportunities.

That is useful to remember in markets but also in business.

Some people chase upsides because they fear missing out.
Some people avoid risk because they’ve seen what losing feels like.
Some people never stop pushing because they don’t know what enough means.

The book is not a technical investing manual. It won’t tell you exactly what to buy or when to sell.

Its value is better than that.

It helps you understand the person making the decision.

You.

W3DC learning: building wealth is not just about finding opportunity. It is about building the temperament to keep opportunity from turning into self-sabotage.

The real edge is not always intelligence.

Sometimes it is patience, humility, and knowing when not to do something stupid!

A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed.

The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.

They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.

Seats are limited by design.

Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

The picks-and-shovels play in RWAs, rails, compliance layers, and custody solutions that most people are sleeping on.

Everyone is talking about what gets tokenised. Fewer people are asking what makes tokenisation actually work.

The RWA narrative has predictably gravitated toward the assets themselves, treasuries, real estate, and private credit. But the more durable opportunity sits one layer down, in the infrastructure that has to exist before any of this scales. The firms quietly building that layer are not the ones generating headlines.

Consider what a compliant tokenised asset actually requires: a legal wrapper that survives cross-border scrutiny, a smart contract framework that enforces transfer restrictions without manual intervention, an on-chain identity layer that satisfies KYC/AML obligations, and custody infrastructure that institutions will actually trust. That is four distinct problems, each with its own regulatory surface area, and most projects are either building all of it themselves or hoping someone else will solve it first.

The picks-and-shovels plays emerging here fall into three buckets.

First, compliance rails, on-chain KYC/AML solutions like Chainanalysis and emerging identity primitives that let asset issuers gate who holds what, without rebuilding the wheel each time.

Second, issuance infrastructure, platforms like Brickken, Tokeny, and Securitise abstract the legal and technical complexity of bringing an asset on-chain so issuers can focus on the asset, not the architecture.

Third, institutional custody, the bridge between TradFi risk appetite and on-chain settlement, where players like Fireblocks and Copper are increasingly the quiet prerequisite for any deal getting done.

The pattern rhymes with early fintech. Stripe did not become valuable because payments were exciting, it became valuable because every business that wanted to take payments needed Stripe first. The RWA infrastructure layer is being built on the same logic. The asset flows are coming. The question is who owns the pipes when they do.

Most investors are underwriting the assets. The smarter bet may be underwriting the infrastructure those assets can't move without.

This Deutsche Bank report is worth reading because it cuts through one of the biggest confusions in digital finance:

Not all digital money is the same.

Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs are often spoken about as if they are competing versions of one idea. The report makes a better point: they are different instruments, built by different issuers, for different use cases.

Stablecoins are currently the most visible. Their market has grown from around $50bn in 2021 to more than $300bn by April 2026, dominated almost entirely by US dollar-backed tokens.

But the report adds an important reality check.

Stablecoin volumes look enormous on the surface, but much of that activity is still crypto-native. In 2025, headline stablecoin transaction volume was estimated at $62 trillion. Once bots, internal transactions and non-economic flows are stripped out, the adjusted number falls to around $4.2trn. Real-economy payments are estimated at only $300bn–$550bn.

That is still meaningful. But it shows stablecoins have not “taken over payments” yet. They are moving from crypto liquidity tools toward payment infrastructure, especially for cross-border transfers, B2B payments, remittances and USD access in markets where traditional rails are slow or expensive.

Tokenised deposits are the bank response.

Instead of issuing money outside the banking system, they bring commercial bank deposits into programmable environments. That could allow 24/7 settlement, automated treasury workflows, faster correspondent banking, and eventually better cash management across multiple banks.

The catch is interoperability. Tokenised deposits work well inside a bank or closed network, but scaling them across institutions requires shared rulebooks, governance, legal clarity and integration into existing banking systems.

CBDCs are the public money layer.

Retail CBDCs remain politically and commercially difficult, with adoption still uncertain. Wholesale CBDCs look more practical because they support bank-to-bank settlement, tokenised capital markets, delivery-versus-payment, and payment-versus-payment use cases.

The bigger story is not which form of digital money “wins”.

It is that money is becoming programmable, always-on, and more deeply connected to tokenised markets.

For corporates, this could mean faster cross-border payments, better treasury visibility and more flexible liquidity management.

For banks, it means deciding whether they shape the new rails or simply connect to someone else’s.

For custodians, it means wallets, convertibility and 24/7 asset servicing become core infrastructure.

W3DC point: digital money is no longer just a crypto story. It is becoming a banking, payments and treasury infrastructure story.

The future may not be one form of digital money replacing another.

It may be banks, corporates and custodians learning how to move between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs depending on the transaction.

Hyperliquid, a major decentralised perpetual futures exchange, recently hit a record 8% market share of aggregate perpetual open interest across all major platforms.

However, the native HYPE token has experienced a pullback, falling 12% in a week following a scheduled $700 million monthly token unlock and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes selling his $18 million stake.

Major recent updates regarding the protocol include:

Until next time