Crypto outfit Moon Mortgage raises $3.5M seed round

Moon Mortgage, a crypto-backed mortgage provider, on Tuesday announced raising a $3.5 million seed round, led primarily by Cadenza Ventures and CoinFund. The funds will be utilized to finance its lending product, CryptoMortgage.

Moon Mortgage’s CryptoMortgages will allow investors to take out loans against their digital assets. The product also takes the investors’ digital assets as collateral and gives 100% financing for investment properties. 

CryptoMortgage will soon be launching for homebuyers in Texas, Florida and Colorado, as well as investors in investment properties in most states across the U.S. 

Founded in 2022 by Aaron Nevin and Tristan Marino, Moon Mortgage was the product of the founders’ advocacy for crypto and their frustrations with the lack of its applications in digital asset lending. The team, thus, set out to create a platform that will allow people with crypto assets to make physical investments and use crypto as collateral to secure loans. 

Nevin, co-founder and CEO of Moon Mortgage, told CoinDesk that people have an incentive to invest in real estate with crypto. However, until now, they did not have the “ability to” as buying homes in the past required them to liquidate their assets, lose upside and receive a “massive” tax bill. With CryptoMortgage, the company aims to connect crypto and TradFi to make leveraging digital assets easier.

While there is still a long way to go for the convergence of TradFi and crypto, Moon Mortgage aims to bridge that gap now, he added.

“Our $3.5 million investment — an impressive feat given the bearish outlook still given on crypto — will go a long way to making that vision a reality, as we look to launch our CryptoMortgage product this year,” said Nevin in a statement.

Moon Mortgage’s crypto assets are stored with Anchorage Digital, a cryptocurrency custodial firm that is also the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S. 

“Many investors have been able to make impressive gains by investing in crypto – but you still can’t use it to buy a house,” said Nevin in the statement. 

Apart from Moon Mortgage, a few other crypto-based companies have also recently had funding rounds. MinePlex, a Singapore-based crypto bank, secured a $100 million funding round led by Bahamas-based digital asset investment firm GEM Digital Limited. MinePles aims to use the funds to expand business on a global scale and develop new banking technologies with payment processing companies like Visa and Mastercard to enable digital asset payments.

Cryptocurrency’s place in real estate remains an intriguing question market. Figure, led by former SoFi chief executive Mike Cagney, has placed big bets on the promise of blockchain and, ultimately, cryptocurrency-backed mortgages. He launched the company’s first crypto-mortgage product earlier this year. Two other companies have announced the product since December, including Miami-based digital lender Milo and Toronto-based cryptocurrency lending platform Ledn.  

In March, HousingWire reported on the NFT craze and what kind of disruption blockchain could present to traditional processes in real estate.

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