ETHZilla Buys 15% Of Zippy To Tokenize Manufactured Home Loans

Ethereum treasury and RWA platform ETHZilla has signed definitive agreements to acquire a 15 percent fully diluted equity stake in US digital lender Zippy, a specialist in manufactured home loans.

According to a company press release, the roughly 21.1 million dollar deal is structured as 5 million dollars in cash, 14 million dollars in ETHZilla common stock issued to Zippy, plus an additional 2.1 million dollars in stock to select Zippy shareholders.

The two companies plan to bring Zippy originated manufactured home loans on-chain as tokenized real-world assets. Zippy continues to originate and service loans, while ETHZilla provides the tokenization infrastructure and distribution rails for investors.

Why Manufactured Home Loans Are A Big RWA Target

Zippy positions itself as a fully digital lending platform focused only on manufactured housing, aiming to replace the industry’s slow, paper-heavy processes with online origination, servicing and reporting.

Manufactured homes are a major but often overlooked slice of US housing. They are a key path to homeownership for lower and middle income households, but financing is frequently structured as so-called chattel loans that sit outside standard mortgage channels and can carry higher rates and less borrower protection.

By partnering with a specialist like Zippy, ETHZilla is targeting:

• A credit segment with billions in annual originations and relatively few scaled fintech lenders
• Loans that are secured by tangible housing assets and can be pooled into predictable income streams
• A politically sensitive but systemically important part of the housing market that regulators are increasingly watching

The thesis is simple: if Zippy can originate cleaner, data rich manufactured home loans at scale, ETHZilla can package and tokenize those loan pools as yield bearing RWAs for on-chain investors.

Deal Structure And Exclusive Tokenization Rights

The Zippy deal is not just a minority equity investment. It also locks Zippy’s future blockchain activity into ETHZilla’s RWA stack for the next three years.

Per the transaction terms outlined in the press release and summarized in Chinese flash feeds, for the 36 months following closing:

• All blockchain infrastructure and token issuance tied to Zippy must run through ETHZilla’s partner stack Liquidity.io and Satschel
• ETHZilla effectively owns the on-chain distribution channel for Zippy originated loans during that period
• Zippy gets a dedicated path to bring its loans into a regulated tokenization and trading environment without stitching together multiple vendors

This gives ETHZilla a pipeline of potential housing RWAs that is both contractually exclusive and vertically integrated from origination to secondary trading.

How Liquidity.io And Satschel Fit Into The RWA Stack

The Zippy partnership plugs directly into ETHZilla’s existing build out of a regulated tokenization and trading stack.

Earlier this year ETHZilla invested 15 million dollars into Satschel, the parent of regulated digital asset marketplace Liquidity.io, in return for a 15 percent equity stake and strategic rights around tokenized credit distribution.

In simple terms:

• Satschel provides the compliance and infrastructure backbone for regulated private credit and structured products
• Liquidity.io operates an SEC licensed alternative trading system for tokenized securities
• ETHZilla supplies the on-chain asset management layer, treasury capital and DeFi integrations

The Zippy agreement routes manufactured home loan tokenization into that same stack, turning Liquidity.io into the primary venue for any future Zippy backed RWA notes or tokens that ETHZilla issues.

ETHZilla’s Broader Credit RWA Strategy

The Zippy move does not come out of nowhere. It follows ETHZilla’s push into other credit verticals.

Most recently, ETHZilla agreed to buy 20 percent of AI powered auto lending platform Karus in a 10 million dollar deal that will see Karus underwritten auto loans tokenized for trading on Liquidity.io.

Taken together, the pattern looks like this:

• Use ETHZilla’s Ethereum treasury and stock market access to fund strategic stakes in loan origination platforms
• Lock those platforms into the same Satschel and Liquidity.io tokenization stack through exclusivity clauses
• Turn each vertical auto loans, manufactured housing, and potentially others into repeatable RWA products that can be packaged and sold to investors on-chain

Zippy extends that strategy into one of the most socially and politically charged corners of US consumer credit housing finance for lower income households.

What Tokenized Manufactured Home Loans Could Look Like

Neither ETHZilla nor Zippy has published concrete token designs yet, but based on the company’s prior RWA messaging and the structure around Karus, a plausible design might include:

• Pools of Zippy originated manufactured home loans grouped by risk tier, geography or community operator
• Senior and mezzanine tranches represented as tokenized notes that pay out interest and principal from loan cash flows
• On-chain reporting that surfaces loan level performance data, delinquencies and prepayment speeds in near real time
• Listings on Liquidity.io for qualified investors, with potential for DeFi integrations where those notes can be used as collateral

For Zippy, tokenization could offer a cheaper, more flexible funding model compared with traditional securitizations. For ETHZilla, it is another source of yield bearing credit that can sit alongside its large ETH treasury and restaking strategies.

Regulatory And Risk Questions

Bringing manufactured home credit on-chain raises several questions that regulators and investors will be watching closely.

Key issues include:

• Borrower protection: manufactured home buyers are often financially fragile. Tokenizing their loans does not remove consumer protection obligations around fair lending, servicing and collections.
• Regulatory perimeter: tokenized notes backed by Zippy loans will almost certainly be treated as securities, with all the usual disclosure and suitability requirements. Liquidity.io’s regulated status is a feature here, not a formality.
• Concentration and correlation: manufactured housing communities can be highly sensitive to local economic shocks. Investors will need to understand how diversified or concentrated each loan pool really is.
• Governance and control: exclusivity to ETHZilla’s stack creates alignment, but it also means a lot of infrastructure, credit modeling and distribution risk is consolidated in one ecosystem.

If ETHZilla and Zippy can navigate these issues, manufactured housing could become a flagship case study for how contentious real world credit can be brought on-chain in a compliant way.

How This Fits Into The RWA And Housing Narrative

From a macro point of view, the Zippy deal sits at the intersection of three narratives:

• On-chain credit is moving beyond simple treasury bills and blue chip RWAs into more complex, higher yielding asset classes
• Housing affordability is a political flashpoint, and manufactured homes are increasingly framed as a practical solution that still lacks modern financing rails
• Public market vehicles like ETHZilla are trying to give equity investors levered exposure to both crypto native assets and tokenized off-chain yield

If the Zippy partnership works, ETHZilla can point to a live, scaled example of real households paying real loans that feed cash flows into blockchain based products. That is the kind of story regulators, institutional allocators and retail traders can all understand even if they do not care about DeFi jargon.

Conclusion

ETHZilla’s 15 percent stake in Zippy turns a niche, underbanked corner of US housing finance into its next big RWA experiment. By locking Zippy’s tokenization flows into the Liquidity.io and Satschel stack, ETHZilla is betting that manufactured home loans can be packaged, regulated and traded like any other income producing security, while still improving the borrower experience on the ground.