Grant Cardone says the apartment buildings his firm finances through Fannie Mae (FNMA) carry Bitcoin (BTCUSD) alongside them, and the lender isn't told. "I never tell Fannie Mae I'm putting Bitcoin on it," he said on stage at the Bitcoin Treasuries Conference in New York, in remarks reported by Stocktwits on Oct. 11, adding that he leaves the Bitcoin out of the conversation "because it's just too much."
Cardone is the sales trainer and real estate investor whose Cardone Capital raises money from retail investors for apartment deals, and who this month said a SpaceX (SPCX) employee who just became a millionaire would be making a mistake by selling stock. At the time of his Bitcoin remarks, he was speaking on a panel alongside Anthony Bassili, the President of Coinbase Global's (COIN) Coinbase Asset Management. The conference agenda lists the session for Sept. 28. Every figure that follows is his own, and no filings accompany them.
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By Cardone's account, his firm is working on about $600 million in deals, carrying about $350 million in debt. Bitcoin was trading near $83,330 when the Stocktwits report ran. Cardone repeated a forecast that the crypto could reach $400,000 or $500,000 within five years, and tied the lender comment to it: If Bitcoin gets there, "they're going to wish they gave me a loan on that Bitcoin, not on the real estate."
He also described how he sells the idea, and the pitch runs the same way. Cardone said he has brought about 3,000 people into BTC over the past 18 months by leading with property rather than the cryptocurrency. "I never talk about Bitcoin. I talk about the real estate." As Stocktwits reports it, that line is about investors, not lenders, but the method is the same one he described using with Fannie Mae. The real estate is the conversation, and the Bitcoin sits behind it.
Fannie Mae is the government-sponsored enterprise — in federal conservatorship since 2008— that buys and guarantees mortgages, including loans on apartment buildings through its network of approved multifamily lenders. Multifamily underwriting centers on the property's cash flow, with Fannie Mae's Multifamily Selling and Servicing Guide setting out the sponsor's and any guarantor's financial requirements. Cardone did not describe what his own loan documents require of him, and nothing in the remarks establishes that a BTC position held alongside a property has to be disclosed to the lender at all. Barchart has not seen the loan agreements.
What makes the admission land is where the lender was already heading. In June 2025, the Federal Housing Finance Agency directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FMCC) to prepare proposals for counting cryptocurrency held on regulated U.S. exchanges as an asset in mortgage risk assessments, and in March 2026, Barchart reported that Fannie Mae is now accepting crypto-backed mortgages. Those moves cover single-family home loans to individuals, not the apartment-building loans Cardone described, so the lender he says he keeps Bitcoin from has been moving toward counting it on a different side of its business. Cardone's version of the same idea arrives from the borrower's side: He would rather Fannie lent against the coin.
Cardone has been promoting the pairing publicly since at least June, when it drew a response from Peter Schiff, the gold investor and Bitcoin critic. "Combining real estate with Bitcoin solves nothing," Schiff posted on X on June 21, arguing that a building's rental income already covers its running costs. "Happy to debate this," he added. The Stocktwits report also noted that Better Home & Finance (BETR), which offers a Bitcoin-backed down-payment loan, requires the pledged crypto to be worth 250% of the loan, a reminder of how much haircut a lender applies when it does count crypto.
Cardone's position, as he put it on stage, is that the agency has the collateral backwards: It lent him money against the buildings, and the asset he expects to appreciate is the one it never asked about. Whether Fannie Mae agrees is a question it has not answered publicly, and Cardone's five-year number is the kind of forecast that can be scored in 2031.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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