Real Estate Secured Lending for Bitcoin and Ethereum Investors

A particular conversation comes up often enough to be worth writing down. Someone has done well in bitcoin or ethereum, wants to move part of it into something that produces income rather than price movement, and would rather not simply watch a chart for another cycle.

Property-backed lending in Costa Rica does that job, and the mechanics are more straightforward than most people expect.

Everything is worked in dollars

This is the first and most important point, and it removes most of the confusion. The loan itself is a dollar instrument from beginning to end. The amount lent, the appraisal, the registered lien, the monthly interest and the principal returned at maturity are all denominated in US dollars.

So crypto is converted to dollars, and the loan proceeds in dollars from there. Nothing about the loan floats with a token price, and neither the borrower nor the lender is exposed to crypto volatility once the file has closed. Your monthly figure is the same in a bull market and a crash.

How the conversion happens on any given file — where, when, and on which side — is worked out between the lender and the borrower at the time, once there are interested parties on both sides. There is no single fixed procedure, and pretending otherwise would be inventing one.

What you actually hold

Not a token, not a claim on a pool, not a yield product. You hold a first-position lien on a specific Costa Rican property, registered in your name at the National Registry, for an amount well below what that property is worth.

Anyone with an account can look up that record: the folio number, the owner, the liens against it and their order. For someone accustomed to reading a chain on a block explorer, the analogy is close enough to be useful — a public ledger of ownership and encumbrances that does not depend on anyone’s word. The difference is that what it records is land.

The trade you are making

Worth being blunt about, because it cuts both ways. You give up the upside. If your position doubles over the term of the loan, you will not have participated in that.

What you get instead is a known figure, on a known date, for a known period, with a registered asset behind it. Terms run six months to three years and rates 9% to 16% annually depending on the file, from $50,000 upward with no ceiling. At 12%, $200,000 produces roughly $2,000 a month.

You also give up liquidity, which for anyone used to selling a position at three in the morning is the sharper adjustment. Capital is committed until maturity. The usual answer is to stagger maturities across several loans so that a portion frees up periodically.

Why the borrower pays that rate

The return has an ordinary explanation, which is precisely what you want. Bank credit in Costa Rica requires permanent residency, and that takes four years at minimum. That leaves solvent owners — people with paid-off property and provable income — outside the banking system for reasons of immigration paperwork rather than credit quality. They pay a private rate because the bank door is closed, not because anyone considers them a poor risk.

If you would rather buy than lend

Some people in this conversation are not looking for monthly income at all — they want to convert gains into property directly. That is a different transaction, and our real estate side handles it: GAP Real Estate works with buyers in Costa Rica and can take bitcoin on a purchase.

Lending and buying answer different questions. Buying gives you an asset and the work that comes with owning it. Lending gives you a claim against someone else’s asset and a payment schedule.

Getting started

No residency is required, no local company, and you do not need to be in the country — plenty of lenders here have never stood on the property they financed. Closing costs run around 8% of the loan between legal fees and GAP’s fee, agreed before signing.

The conversion window

The one moment where price movement matters is the gap between deciding to fund a file and the dollars being in place. It is short, but it is not zero, and it is worth planning rather than discovering.

The practical answer most lenders use is to complete the conversion before committing to a specific file, so the amount available is a known dollar figure rather than a moving one. Once the loan closes, the exposure ends entirely — the instrument is denominated in dollars and behaves the same whatever markets do afterwards.

Keep the paper trail

Anyone who has held crypto for a while knows this already, but it applies with extra force when the funds are crossing into a registered transaction in another country. Keep the record of the conversion, the transfer, and the closing together from the start.

How the resulting income is treated depends on where you are tax resident, and the honest answer is that nobody can tell you the figure without knowing that. The supervision and tax questions are separate and are covered here — worth reading before the money moves rather than afterwards.

If the money is arriving from outside Costa Rica, an escrow arrangement is the usual way to handle timing: funds sit until the file is ready and are released on closing day. That is covered in detail here, and the full process is here.

Article by Glenn Tellier (Founder of CRIE and Grupo Gap)