ETHZilla Corporation (NASDAQ: ETHZ), a technology company focused on bringing decentralized finance infrastructure to traditional finance, is partnering with Zippy Inc., a digital lending platform, to bring manufactured home loans on-chain as tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
Zippy originates secured loans backed by manufactured homes through a platform engineered for institutional scale, real-time data integrity, and transparent investor reporting. According to the companies, Zippy’s loan origination and servicing technology will be integrated with ETHZilla’s tokenization stack, with the goal to create a transparent, secured manufactured housing lending product accessible to investors.
Under the terms of the partnership agreements, ETHZilla will acquire a 15% fully diluted ownership stake in Zippy for $5 million in cash and $14 million in shares of common stock payable to Zippy (subject to certain cash true-up rights) and $2.1 million in shares of common stock issuable to certain individual shareholders of Zippy. ETHZilla will also appoint a new member to Zippy’s board of directors.
“We believe that Zippy has built an institutional-grade lending and servicing platform with a modern data architecture that enables both large scale investor participation and efficient on-chain distribution, which is expected to help unlock access to the estimated $14 billion manufactured home financial services market1,” said McAndrew Rudisill, chairman and CEO of ETHZilla. “This relationship is expected to give ETHZilla direct access to a new, large-scale real-world asset category and extend our tokenization capabilities into residential lending. We believe that manufactured homes represent an affordable housing solution, a compelling yield opportunity, and an ideal fit for our on-chain securitization framework. With this transaction, we plan to move our business model directly into the home-lending market, which we expect will position ETHZilla as a leading player in US on-chain home finance with only one significant competitor.”
“ETHZilla’s blockchain infrastructure gives Zippy the ability to turn its chattel assets into an accessible, technology-driven investment vehicle,” added Ben Halliday, co-founder and CEO of Zippy. “By combining our community-focused lending platform with ETHZilla’s tokenization engine, we believe we can accelerate America’s most cost-effective housing option while opening access for investors to participate in a market that has been dominated by privately held companies for decades.”
