Private mortgages in Canada pay about 8%. Getting into one has meant $100,000, a lockup of a year or two, and your money riding on a single borrower.
“There’s multiple mortgages where if you wanted to invest in a private mortgage to get 8% back, it’s typically you’re concentrated into one asset. You need to have at least 100k, a minimum of 100k investment,” Alex Lazarev, one of the founders of a startup called Refi2, said in an interview. “But this way, we’ve securitized the fund and made it possible to have one dollar minimums, instant liquidity, so you’re not locked into the term of the loan.”
A dollar, in other words, instead of $100,000. And Refi2 wants to use that same yield to reach savers in Kenya. “Canadian mortgages with African capital,” Lazarev said of the pairing. “It’s just like, oh, whoa.”
The token advertises roughly 8% in USDC, backed by Canadian private mortgages held in a regulated mortgage investment corporation and, Refi2 says, overcollateralized by 110% or more. Why has no one done this before? “The financial plumbing, for lack of a better word, hasn’t been at the point that it needed to be,” the founders said.
How tokenized mortgages work
Instead of $100,000 in one loan, you hold a token worth a sliver of a pool. What makes that work now, they say, is speed. “Money can move from Kenya to the North Pole to Switzerland in less than seven seconds,” Lazarev said.
A planned feature, not yet live, goes at trust: a digital twin of each mortgage, meant to replace the quarterly statement. “Unlike normal funds where you have quarterly reporting, we’re offering all that transparency on chain for the secondary market,” the founders said. “Whether it’s this mortgage is paying on time, this one’s delinquent, all the stats are going to be completely transparent.”
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The liquidity question
“Instant liquidity” describes the token, not the mortgages. Those loans still run their full term, and an anytime exit only works if someone buys the token when a holder wants out. For a young token, that market is thin. Canada’s private mortgage funds have trapped investors before: Romspen suspended redemptions in 2022 and has yet to fully reopen, and Mortgage Company of Canada gated its fund this May, part of some C$30 billion in Canadian private real estate funds now frozen, per Bloomberg and The Globe and Mail. The structure Refi2 cites as a safeguard is the same kind doing the gating.
What a buyer owns is a separate question. “You own the token and the token is the asset, you own the asset. It’s different. It’s what we call title tokenization,” Chris Turner, co-founder of the tokenization firm Kula, who has run title-tokenization deals in Kenya, Zambia and Nepal, said on the On The Margin podcast, drawing a contrast with a token that is “giving a contractual exposure to the economic upside of that particular asset. But you don’t own the asset.” A Refi2 buyer sits in that second camp: exposure to a mortgage pool’s yield, not the mortgages.
Refi2 is not the only one chasing this. Established players spent 2026 pushing crypto into home lending and putting mortgage books on chain, and rival credit pools already run on Solana. Its bet: that live, loan-by-loan reporting is what tells a real product from a yield farm.
Why the founders are courting Kenya
The push abroad started with investors who wanted proof. Venture capitalists liked the pitch, the founders said, but “want to see traction.” Lazarev and co-founder Rob Taylor said they have since been in contact with the Central Bank of Kenya about a tool that would let Kenyans save in dollars and earn yield, a hedge against the currency slide they expect around the country’s next election. The bank has not confirmed anything, and Refi2’s site does not mention Kenya.
They insist the model is hands-off. “We don’t ever move their money. We don’t ever hold their money,” they said. “We’re giving them a platform, safe yield instruments like the Canadian mortgages, for them to be able to invest into.”
Should developing-market savers be steered into Canadian real estate credit at all? The founders answer with a savings pitch. “The goal is to implement savings and for these developing nations to start understanding what savings are, what investing is,” they said.
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From snow shoveling to smart contracts
Refi2 came out of a failed pivot. “I have been an operator since the age of 11,” Lazarev said, tracing a line from a snow shoveling business to a seven-figure tech exit to last-mile logistics to a dev shop he started with Taylor.
The two had spent the prior year on something else. “Me and Alex had worked on a startup last year prior to this. We were basically doing agentic portfolio management,” Taylor said. “Found that there really wasn’t a perfect product market fit for the idea that we had. So we had to pivot into basically whatever was going to make us money at the time.”
The mortgage idea came from a third man. Taylor said Bryce Jones, a vice president at Modern Niagara, one of Canada’s largest mechanical and building-systems contractors, brought it to him in January. They had met years earlier as, in Taylor’s words, “two of the top investors within another crypto project.”
“He came to me with this idea to tokenize Canadian mortgages, but he just didn’t have the developers to build it out at the time,” Taylor said. “We had the dev shop, we had the developer network. It was the perfect fit, the perfect timing.” Now the developers write the smart contracts and the two founders chase deals, “essentially being shock troopers and going into whatever city we need to develop these relationships,” Lazarev said.
The bull case, and the caveats
The founders think the market is small now and about to explode. “This year we had maybe 30 billion in private credit on chain,” one said, putting crypto at “like six trillion” now and real-world assets on track for “at least 30 trillion” by 2030, a number at the aggressive end of forecasts, and theirs.
For now Refi2 is early: a yield product just starting to take on assets, a cross-border plan its own website doesn’t mention yet, and market numbers investors will want to check for themselves.
Even the founders concede the hard part is still ahead. Easier assets got tokenized first, they said, because a mortgage is messier than a Treasury bill: “Right now we’re looking at tokenized treasury bills where it’s easy to throw a wrapper around something that there’s no payees, there’s no loan administration, there’s not the millions of things that happen, say, with private lending.”
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