Bitcoin-Backed Loans in New York (2026)

NYDFS: new rules, new leadership

The September 2025 custody guidance is the sleeper story for borrowers. NYDFS now requires licensed custodians to segregate customer assets and bars them from using customer crypto for their own benefit, including as collateral. That effectively writes a no-rehypothecation rule into New York supervision: an NY-licensed platform cannot quietly re-lend your coins the way Celsius did. It is a real consumer protection, and another structural reason lending products are hard to launch inside the BitLicense perimeter. A companion September 2025 guidance extended blockchain-analytics expectations, transaction monitoring and wallet screening, to New York banking organizations.

Leadership turnover: Superintendent Adrienne Harris, the architect of NYDFS's expanded crypto unit, departed in October 2025, with Kaitlin Asrow named acting superintendent. Whether Asrow-era NYDFS keeps approving licenses at 2026's pace is the question that determines how fast New York's lender menu grows.

The BitLicense thaw

After years defined by the 2015 exodus, when Kraken, ShapeShift and others simply left, 2026 brought grants that suggest the door is opening.

• Licence grantedStrike, Mar 2026

  Strike receives a BitLicense

  Strike received a BitLicense and money transmitter license on March 6, 2026, covering buy and sell, custody, and bill pay for New Yorkers, with CEO Jack Mallers framing it as bringing bitcoin to the global center of finance. Strike has announced bitcoin-backed lending as a future rollout; it is not live in New York today. If and when it reaches the state, it would be a meaningful addition to a thin lending market.

• Licence grantedMastercard, May 2026

  Mastercard secures a BitLicense

  Granted May 27, 2026 for stablecoin and digital-asset settlement infrastructure, a signal of how mainstream the license has become.

There is still no BitLicense reform statute. The only formal easing remains the 2020 conditional-license framework, and Gov. Hochul vetoed the legislature's unanimously passed crypto task force bill in December 2025. Albany studies crypto when the governor wants it studied.

On the horizon

• Passed Senate Jun 2026S9891B

  Crypto ATM bill

  Passed the Senate 59 to 2 in June 2026 and sits in the Assembly: DFS licensing for kiosk operators, a 3% fee cap, the toughest proposed anywhere when most states cap at 12% to 18%, limits of $1,500 per day and $10,000 per month, and 72-hour holds with a refund right.

• In effect to mid-2027Executive order, Jul 2026

  Mining permit freeze

  A July 14, 2026 executive order froze new air permits for hyperscale data centers over 20 MW for a year, successor to the expired 2022 proof-of-work moratorium and the binding constraint on any New York mining growth through mid-2027.

• Re-referred, againA7788

  State agencies accepting BTC for taxes and fees

  The perennial A7788 was re-referred to committee in January 2026, as it has been every year since 2017.

Lending & borrowing: why the menu is thin, and what that costs

Two structural facts do the work. First, New York's usury caps, 16% civil and 25% criminal under $250,000, sit below some lenders' top published APRs, making the state legally awkward for high-rate products. Second, the BitLicense makes every product launch a supervisory event.

The result is concrete: Coinbase's bitcoin-backed USDC loans, rolled out to every other state at limits up to $1 million, still exclude New York as of the latest reporting. New Yorkers pay the country's second-highest tax rate on realized gains, up to roughly 14.8% combined state and city, yet have the fewest regulated ways to borrow instead of sell. four of the seven lenders we track serve New York, with Figure, SALT and Unchained sitting it out. The ones that do have cleared the hardest regulatory bar in the country, which is its own quality signal.

Because the state and city bill on a sale is so large here, the timing question is unusually sharp: borrowing against bitcoin is not a disposal, and the bitcoin loan calculator shows what deferring it costs.

Providers & industry

New York remains crypto's institutional capital even while being its hardest market. Gemini, NYC-headquartered and NYDFS trust-chartered, went public on Nasdaq in September 2025 under the ticker GEMI, the flagship New York-regulated crypto firm. Upstate, the Greenidge gas-plant mining fight that sparked the original 2022 moratorium still frames the state's mining politics.

The pattern holds: New York exports crypto capital and regulation, and imports very little of the industry itself.