Cryptocurrencies could be a fulcrum to President Donald Trump’s plans to address the nation’s seemingly chronic need for more housing, and at prices accessible to median income Americans.
That was just one of the key takeaways of a conference held by the president at his Mar-a-Lago club on April 25, said participant Grant Cardone.
Cardone, CEO of Aventura-based Cardone Capital, spoke at the one-day gathering of about 500 people at the Winter White House.
“Obviously, I’ve been a supporter of the president for some time,” said Cardone, who said he was invited to talk at the Palm Beach summit. “I’m also the largest real estate Bitcoin fund in the world today with a hybrid model, and their team wanted me to speak on this real estate-bitcoin hybrid.”
Who was at Trump crypt summit at Mar-a-Lago?
The president was in attendance, and delivered remarks right after Cardone completed his 20-minute presentation. Before that, the vocal Bitcoin investor and bull Cathie Wood, who is the CEO of ARK Invest, spoke as well. The venture capitalist Tim Draper also was among those present.
The sessions were not open to the media. Trump’s speech was to have been delivered on a livestream but the link was taken down prior to his remarks, according to the White House reporters traveling the president on that visit to Palm Beach.
Cardone, in an interview with The Palm Beach Post on April 28, said his firm is working on his sixth real estate transaction using Bitcoin, for a total of $1 billion worth of assets with $200 million of that in Bitcoin.
One deal is for the property at 101 Mizner in Boca Raton, which Cardone won exclusive rights to from a bankruptcy case.
Cardone said the deal was a $235 million transaction in which his firm added $100 million in Bitcoin. He added the purchase, completed in 2025, was oversubscribed by investors at $335 million in the real estate Bitcoin fund he termed the “largest of its kind.”
Can crypto money resolve US housing challenges?
But Cardone said the more universal application of digital currencies, particularly in addressing national housing needs, is their use in a “hybrid” collateral model. In that model, Cardone said real estate — a “very stable asset, well-understood asset” — is paired with a digital asset.
“The real estate is real,” he said. “The Bitcoin lives in this digital platform, right? You can’t touch it, feel it, use it.”
The combination would maximize financial performance and housing production by “offsetting” each asset’s deficiency.
“It’s a hedge,” he said. “It’s either a hedge against the real estate or it’s a hedge against the Bitcoin.”
The potential impact and widespread applicability for the American housing market would be for the Federal Housing Finance Agency to adopt and incorporate the hybrid model.
The federal agency oversees Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which inject liquidity and capital into the U.S. housing industry by buying mortgages from lenders, thereby freeing up financing for further real estate lending.
The agency based in Washington, D.C., has told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept cryptocurrency as a valid asset for mortgage underwriting. Fannie Mae began accepting crypto-backed mortgages in which borrowers use digital crypto currencies as collateral for home loans.
A broad incorporation of the hybrid use could happen, Cardone said, by the time the second Trump administration ends in early 2029.
“Bill Pulte is running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. … He will look at Bitcoin and real estate as a better collateral than just real estate by itself,” said Cardone. “He’s promoting that your Bitcoin, or your crypto-holdings, should be collateral.”
Cardone attended Trump’s election night party at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 5, 2024. He also advocated for Pulte’s assignment to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
How has Trump sought to address America’s housing needs?
Trump has talked about the country’s housing issues.
He has enacted tariffs on imported timber and sought to remove regulations to U.S. lumber production, saying those measures would lower building costs, though some economists and other industry analysts have questioned the strategy. The president has also called for opening up federal lands for homebuilding, but that approach, too, has faced skepticism.
In March, the median price for a single-family home sold in Palm Beach County was at $645,000, a 3.2% rise over the same month in 2025. That figure was nearly $300,000 more than the median price six years ago, in March 2020, and out of reach for most middle-income buyers in the president’s adopted home county.
Analysts have said the sharp increase is a combination of scarce available land, which has driven up construction costs, and the influx of wealthier buyers from out of the county.
Cardone, however, said Trump “believes America should be the number one leader in crypto” and that he is fully behind its application to housing.
“Clearly he’s a real estate guy. So talking to him about combining the two is not hard,” Cardone said. “He is extremely open-minded to crypto as a whole. … When you’ve been brought up around paper and concrete, real things, you know, it’s a little hard to embrace (a digital asset), but he seems to have a very easy time thinking about a digital exchange between humans.”
Trump forayed into the digital business world in the four years between his two presidencies with visual trading cards depicting him as a superhero, a cowboy and other roles. While in the White House, his family has ventured into the space even deeper with the $TRUMP Memecoin enterprise that launched just before the 2025 inauguration — and which raised conflict of interest concerns from government watchdog groups.
Cardone, for now, is looking ahead to a two-day Connect Wealth Conference his company is hosting in Aventura in the middle of May. Pulte, he said, will be among the presenters and will talk about how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “will embrace these new technologies.”
Cardone also said he and Wood, the crypt proponent, had a conversation two days after the Mar-a-Lago event in which they discussed using the hybrid model to finance a development in the Tampa area.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump Mar-a-Lago summit takeaway: Crypto could solve housing crunch
Reporting by Antonio Fins, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
