The new bond structure gives BTC credit utility, but ties that access to clear liquidation thresholds if prices fall.
On Mar. 31, Moody's assigned provisional Ba2 ratings to up to $100 million in taxable revenue bonds for the Waverose Finance Project. The bonds are secured by a loan to NH CleanSpark Borrower Trust 2026-1, with Bitcoin (BTC) as the pledged collateral.
Those numbers set the conditions under which traditional finance agreed to work with Bitcoin at all: 72.06 cents of credit for every dollar of collateral value, a two-day exposure window to act on price moves, and 1.60x initial collateral coverage, which forces action when it drops to 1.40x.
Bitcoin has spent years auditioning for legitimacy as a store of value, a corporate treasury reserve, and an ETF asset. The New Hampshire deal points to Bitcoin as collateral.
Collateral is where an asset earns credit utility, something institutions can borrow against inside structures that credit markets can understand, price, and, when necessary, liquidate fast. That is the line Bitcoin just crossed.
The Waverose structure is a taxable conduit revenue bond.
At 1.60x initial collateral coverage, the bond starts with debt equal to about 62.5% of collateral value. The 1.40x trigger, at which automatic action kicks in, implies a debt of roughly 71.4%.
The structure hits its wire trip when BTC falls by approximately 12.5% from issuance pricing, a move Bitcoin has executed routinely.
Moody's stressed the collateral value at 72.06% of the market price. Mapped to Bitcoin's Apr. 1 price in the $68,000 zone, the stress zone lands near $49,600.
Standard Chartered put its near-term bear case for Bitcoin at $50,000, and the traditional finance firms calibrated their first public finance haircut on Bitcoin almost exactly on top of a downside path that one of the world's largest banks still considers reachable
New Hampshire arrived alongside two other recent moves pointing in the same direction.
In February, S&P assigned the first-ever rating to a structured finance transaction backed by Bitcoin. The transaction was the Ledn Issuer Trust 2026-1, with roughly $199.1 million in loans secured by 4,078.87 BTC, carrying a fair market value of approximately $356.9 million, implying an LTV of about 55.8% at inception.
In March, Better and Coinbase launched what they called the first crypto-backed conforming mortgage, in which a borrower pledges $250,000 in BTC to fund a $100,000 down payment, while the first lien stays Fannie Mae-backed.New Hampshire arrived alongside two other recent moves pointing in the same direction.
Bitcoin received three credit wrappers in roughly six weeks, each with different haircuts, liquidation mechanics, and regulatory constraints. Together, they describe a process in which Bitcoin enters credit markets through multiple doors at once, and those doors are edging closer to ordinary household finance.