Australians can now use their Bitcoin to buy a house. Not by selling it, mind you, but by pledging it as collateral while keeping exposure to the asset’s upside.
Block Earner, an Australian fintech founded in 2021, has rolled out what it calls the country’s first Bitcoin-backed home loan. The product lets borrowers use BTC as collateral for property deposits worth up to 50% of the property’s value. Fireblocks, the institutional crypto infrastructure firm, provides the multi-party computation (MPC) wallet technology underpinning custody of those pledged assets.
How the product actually works
A borrower locks up Bitcoin as collateral. Block Earner holds that collateral in Fireblocks’ MPC wallets, which split private keys across multiple parties so no single point of failure can compromise the funds. The borrower gets a loan they can use toward a property deposit.
Block Earner explicitly commits to not rehypothecating the collateral, meaning they won’t lend your Bitcoin out to someone else while they’re holding it. The result so far: zero security incidents across Block Earner’s lending products, and loan sizes have been increasing.
