Tech

Uncollateralized DeFi mortgage taken out on Austin condo via Teller

04/27/2022
Bitcoin Ethereum News

A new homeowner has bought an apartment in Austin, Texas, through a program that allows crypto holders to take out traditional uncollateralized mortgages based on their credit scores.

The USDC.homes crypto mortgages platform issued its first crypto loan to an Austin resident who bought a $680,000 condo with a $500,000 loan issued in USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin over the Polygon network.

This new platform combines practices from traditional lending markets such as leveraging a borrower’s credit score to determine eligibility with new decentralized finance (DeFi) innovations such as cryptocurrency staking to help pay off the balance.

Loans from the platform are issued in USD, but borrowers can make payments in Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC) or USDC. It has been built using the Teller lending protocol and backed by the TrueFi project that issues uncollateralized crypto loans. USDC.homes can issue 30-year mortgages as large as $5 million at a 5.5% interest rate which require a 20% down payment.

The first mortgage issued by USDC.homes on the Polygon network.

Each borrower’s down payment is staked, not sold, and accrues interest over time that can be used to help homeowners pay off their loans. According to a Wednesday blog post from Teller, the traditional need to liquidate one’s crypto assets for fiat to secure a loan exposes American borrowers “to the damages of taxation, fees, and a loss of position.”

Real-world loan issuing is becoming a more common use case in the crypto industry. The LoanSnap platform expects to open its services to licensed mortgage brokers this year, according to a Tuesday report from Housing Wire.

By using an artificial intelligence (AI) loan origination system, CEO Karl Jacob told Housing Wire that LoanSnap has issued “billions of dollars” in traditional mortgages. His company’s services have also extended into the crypto space by working with DeFi lender Bacon Protocol to link mortgage values to a nonfungible token (NFT)

Related: Decentralized credit scores: How can blockchain tech change ratings

Bacon Protocol has been issuing NFT mortgages since last November, with lending rates ranging as high as 3.1%, far less than the 5.55% rate on a traditional 30-year mortgage, according to Investopedia.