Bitcoin-Backed Loans in Texas (2026)

The reserve went from law to live position

On November 20, 2025, Texas became the first US state to put bitcoin on its balance sheet, buying $5 million of BTC at roughly $87,000 per coin through BlackRock's IBIT ETF, and building the position to roughly $10 million in bitcoin exposure by mid-2026.

Two structural details make the Texas reserve more durable than the headline. HB 4488 shields the fund from the biennial funds-consolidation sweep, so it cannot be quietly defunded into general revenue. And the fund sits with the Comptroller outside the treasury with its own five-member advisory committee, seated in May 2026 with a telling roster: a pension investment veteran, a blockchain law professor, and executives from miners Cormint and CleanSpark. The mining industry literally advises the state treasury.

The next milestone: acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock issued an RFP to move the reserve from the ETF into direct custody of actual coins, with bids closed June 15, 2026 and a contract targeted for late August. Texas holding its own keys would be a first among states, and would put a major institutional custodian under Texas state contract.

Grid law: SB 6 and the mining economy

The 2025 session's other big crypto-relevant law never says bitcoin. **SB 6** overhauled ERCOT interconnection for loads of 75 MW and up, with new transmission cost allocation, disclosure fees, and mandatory curtailment provisions for large flexible loads.

That formalises the deal Texas miners have long traded on: cheap power in exchange for shutting down when the grid is stressed. Riot famously earned about $32 million in credits during a single 2023 heat wave. Riot's Rockdale and Corsicana campuses remain among the world's largest, with a $400 million permit filed in 2026 for further Corsicana expansion, increasingly aimed at AI compute alongside mining.

On the horizon: the 2027 session takes shape

The legislature does not meet again until January 2027, meaning current law is locked in until then, a stability few states can offer. But the agenda is already visible in the interim charges Lt. Gov. Patrick and Speaker Burrows issued in March 2026: study digital-asset kiosk operations, state and federal regulatory alignment, prediction markets, and elder crypto-fraud.

The sharpest edge: Rep. Cole Hefner plans a 2027 bill to **ban crypto kiosks outright** after Texans lost roughly $57 million to kiosk scams in 2025. Even the most pro-bitcoin state in the country is drawing a hard line between bitcoin finance, which is welcome, and cash kiosks, which are on notice.

Tax: the fine print beyond "no income tax"

For individuals the story stays simple: no income tax, ever, per Prop 2. The nuances are for businesses. A June 2025 Comptroller letter ruling classified bitcoin as **intangible property** for franchise-tax purposes, so crypto businesses cannot take the cost-of-goods-sold deduction on BTC purchases, and crypto sales are sourced by the payor's domicile. Small crypto LLCs under the roughly $2.47 million revenue threshold owe no franchise tax at all.

Since Texas does not tax personal intangible property, individually held bitcoin, including coins pledged as loan collateral, carries zero annual state tax cost. As in Florida, that makes the sell-versus-borrow decision a purely federal one: borrowing is not a taxable event, and the bitcoin loan calculator prices what holding out costs in interest.

Lending & borrowing

A Texas-versus-New-York footnote says everything: Coinbase's bitcoin-backed USDC loans are available in Texas, as everywhere except New York, one more entry on the long list of crypto financial products where Texas is the default on switch.

Austin is home to multisig lender Unchained, and the state-chartered banking system has been authorized to custody digital assets since 2021, infrastructure that the reserve's custody contract may soon test at state scale. Consumer lending itself runs through the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner, which licenses regulated lenders but has no crypto-collateral-specific regime. five of the seven lenders we track serve Texas, with Figure and Arch (Standard) sitting it out.