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The Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast with Tim Kotzman
Using Home Equity to Acquire Bitcoin with Sovana's Sanjay Mavinkurve and Chase Palmieri
00:29:38
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast. I'm Tim Kotsman. I'm here with Sanjay and Chase from Savannah. Did I get that right? It's not Solana. That's right, Sovana. We have to get the jokes out of the way. Thank you guys for, for joining me today. Sanjay, can we start with you? Maybe for those not familiar. I'm not familiar. A little bit about your background and, and your journey to bitcoin.
- [00:25]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Sanjay Mavankurvey. My background in training is really both in computer. I was at Google for almost 20 years, about 18 years. Worked on a bunch of consumer tech products over that time, as you could imagine, everything from Google Maps to the Play store. Worked at YouTube for a little bit. You can think of it as sort of as my first and last job out of college. And about halfway through that tenure at Google, I discovered bitcoin. So this is now in 2012. I was a gold bug at the time. I'm from India. Gold is sort of culturally wired into our DNA there. And so when I first and by the way, physical gold, not etf, not miners, actual gold that I could use as a paperweight, I being a gold bug, the moment I encountered bitcoin, I immediately fell in love. It was for me, everything I loved about gold, but without the physicality. And so I don't have the more typical story of dismissing bitcoin at first and then only later circling back to it. For me, it was almost love at first sight. I still remember it was on an email investing list at Google. A good friend of mine, friend of mine for over 20 years said, and I still remember what he said. He said, if you haven't yet started paying attention to bitcoin, now is the time. This was back in 2012 and since then, this is where I am more typical of bitcoiner. I've just been on this single minded journey of studying bitcoin, trying to get everyone I know into bitcoin and doing everything I can to get to that hyper bitcoinized world. I left Google in 2021 just to take some time off, spend some time with the kids. But I knew that I wanted to work and devote the rest of my life to bitcoin and that's what led me to Silvano and Chase.
- [02:26]
A
Maybe over to you. Can you share a little bit about your background and how you stumbled over bitcoin?
- [02:33]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [02:33]
C
I found Bitcoin in 2015 when I was just finishing up university where I was getting My degree in entrepreneurship and small business management. Been starting and operating businesses since before going to college and getting the degree. Started businesses out of college, ran a tech company for a decade, was the co founder and CEO of Acropolis, which I know we've talked about many times here on this show, which was a bitcoin corporate treasury platform. And recently joined Sanjay and team at Savannah. I actually came across Sanjay's presentation with Vijay Boyapati in 2025. And by the way, Sanjay famously orange filled Vijay, who gave us the book the Bullish Case for Bitcoin. So kind of a one of those historic orange pillings there. And I saw that presentation and I, I probably rewatched it about 20 times right away and just fell in love with the Savannah business model and, and the economics and kind of the win, win, win scenario that I see unlocking here. And I'm sure we're going to get all into it, but I basically went down the Savannah rabbit hole, started working with these gu and recently joined as chief operating officer. And I'm very excited about what I've seen from both the outside and the inside.
- [03:54]
A
Now, Sanjay, can you walk us through maybe the inspiration for Silvana and if there were iterations and how it's structured, what it is?
- [04:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Let's start from the top. So the inspiration for Silvana is I just want to get as many people into bitcoin as possible. If it's the life raft that we all know it is, we should all be trying to get everyone we know to make an allocation. And so when we started brainstorming, we landed on the insight that a lot of people have a lot of their net worth tied up in real estate equity. And if we want to enable folks to get into bitcoin, real estate equity would be a great way to do that. And so what Silvana is at the highest level is it's a way for property owners to tap into their real estate equity to make an investment in bitcoin. But in a way, and this is our superpower in a way that doesn't require any money down nor any monthly payments, a lot of folks who may be sitting on real estate equity can't afford or don't want to make an additional monthly payment that would be required to tap into that equity. Right. You might be sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars of property equity, but without the ability or the desire to pay a monthly payment, it's sitting there trapped. And Solana helps you unlock that. And so that's sort of high level. It's for folks who want to make a serious allocation, you know, not just a few hundred, a few thousand dollars, but 1%, 5%, 10% of their net worth or more. Should I walk through an example? Actually, the best way to understand Silvana is walking through an example. So let's say property owner, based on how much equity they're sitting on, Sovana qualifies them for some investment amount. And what we do is we take a look at the total value of the property, we fund up to 70% of that total value, less any debt on the property. So for example, if you own a property, let's say just to keep the Math Easy of $1,000,000, let's say if you don't have a mortgage on it, we would fund 70% of a million dollars. So we would fund $700,000. However, if you have a mortgage on that property, most people do, we would subtract that from the 700. So if you've got, let's say a $500,000 mortgage on that million dollar property, we would fund $200,000. So based on how much equity you have and how much debt and the value of the property, that's the first step. We qualify you for some investment size. Then our customer decides up to that investment, maximum investment size, the customer decides how much they actually want to invest. So again, let's keep the math easy. Let's say a customer qualifies for and decides on $100,000 investment. We Silvana, using our capital, buy $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. Customer puts nothing in. We actually buy the bitcoin etf. We can go into why a little bit later. But we buy the bitcoin and we set it aside in a dedicated separate account for that particular deal, for that particular property and it sits there for five years. That's the maximum term length. But the customer can end early at any point, they get up to five years at the end of the term, whether that's five years later or whether that's earlier. At the end of the term, we take a look at the value of that bitcoin. It started at 100k. If it's appreciated, we split the, we split the profit 50 50. So let's say the 100k of Bitcoin is now 150k. At the end of the term, we would write a check to the customer for 25k. Customer didn't put a penny in. Okay, so that's the scenario where the investment ends up in a scenario where at the end of the term the investment is down. So let's say at the end of the term, the 100k investment is now 80k. The customer would have to make Silvana whole. The customer would have to write us a check for 20k. Now keep in mind that 20k loss in that scenario for the customer is no different than if the customer had just bought bitcoin with their own money. Right? If they just bought 100k worth of bitcoin and it is down 80k, that's a 20k loss for them. So in a nutshell, the Solvana pitch is you get half of the upside on a bitcoin investment that you put no money into in exchange for covering the downside. So for bitcoiners like all of us here, it's almost a no brainer that five years from now, and remember, it doesn't have to be in exactly five years, it's just at some point during the next five years, it has to be higher than where it is today because you can end early if you start a position today and a year later, bitcoin is doubled. Give me a phone call, I'll sell the bitcoin and write you a check for half the profit. And so for bitcoiners like you and me, you know, we have high confidence, let's say that bitcoin at some point over the next five years is higher than where it is today. And so we see this as a fantastic way for folks to tap into trapped equity that they might be sitting on to make an investment in bitcoin.
- [10:22]
A
What gave you the idea to really focus on the equity in real estate as opposed to going after some other strategy or angle or asset class?
- [10:36]
B
Yeah, so, so, so, so a few things. The first is wanting to enable the most people to make a serious allocation to Bitcoin. Right. 60, 70% of Americans own property and for a lot of them, their property equity is the majority or at least a large percentage of their net worth. And so if you want to enable people to make a serious allocation, again, not a few hundred, a few thousand dollars, but a serious percentage of the net worth, that's where you go, right? It's not that we had any sort of a dream of bridging the real estate world tradfi with bitcoin. And it wasn't we went to real estate because that's where the money is, that's where people's net worth is. Right. That's one. A second is I actually did this myself in 2022. I was sitting on a property that this was during the bitcoin winter when bitcoin went from a high of 69k to 16k. Remember that one, Tim? Were you in bitcoin then? Okay, so you remember that one?
- [12:02]
A
Yeah.
- [12:02]
B
Okay.
- [12:03]
A
Yeah.
- [12:03]
B
We were all there and we felt it. How could we forget? So I remember distinctly when bitcoin was at 30k on its way down from 69, I remember thinking, I have to buy more bitcoin. But I have no money except I had this property. And so I got a cash out refinance. It's an interest only loan that to this day I'm still paying. And I got the cash and I dumped it into bitcoin. And then bitcoin proceeded to get cut in half right from 30 to 16 or wherever it ended. And I remember distinctly feeling two things. A, realizing that you can be sitting on real estate equity, but it's not easy to unlock because that monthly payment, fortunately at the time I was able to pay the monthly payment, but I could imagine a lot of people can't. And B, it's super stressful to do that. Be paying a monthly payment and then seeing your investment get cut in half. That causes a lot of stress. Now for me personally, I slept like a baby because I'm a bitcoiner. Right. But I can imagine for other folks who maybe aren't in bitcoin as long as we are to be a little bit stressed out about that. And so we try to create a product that would alleviate both of those pain points. How can we make it easy and how can we make it less stressful? Because you got five years if bitcoin gets cut in half the day after you open one of these positions, that's always my luck, always gets cut in half as soon as I buy. Don't worry about it. You got five years for bitcoin to do what? Bitcoin does time in the market, not timing the market. That's really how we came to the idea of Solvana Chase.
- [14:01]
A
Anything to add? Any different angles or thoughts over there?
- [14:06]
C
Yeah, I would just mention, to be clear, the reason that the home equity value of the property owner is an important, important piece of the qualification is that the way that Savannah guarantees that that customer is going to make good on the downside payment is that Savannah records a lien of equal value to the starting investment on your property. So just to make that totally clear. So basically that's the catch, if you want to call it that. That's what the property owner brings to this partnership and we call them bitcoin Investment partnerships, bips. The property owner brings their property, we buy the bitcoin using either our own balance sheet or capital partner capital, and we record a lien of equal value and we rip up that lien. If you make payment in the downside scenario or if it's flat or in the upside scenario, and there's no purpose for that lien because we're writing you a check, we tear up that lien and a property owner can always close out that BIP position and start a new one with us. And so we, yeah, we're really excited about how frictionless. And I think this is a big part of Sanjay's background at Google. He really thinks from a UX and product experience perspective. And this product has really been designed in a way where it is as low friction for a property owner to participate as is humanly possible. And we're still finding ways on the back end through automation and, you know, streamlining and third party APIs to even make the process more quick from the point of deciding that you'd like to go ahead and engage Savana in this bitcoin investment partnership to the closing of your initial position. And there's a lot that we're doing there. So everything from the, the buttery experience of the website and you know, this has been proven out through a very large weight list of over 200 million in property owner demand that we're just working to match with capital partners. This is an incredible experience and it's the type of experience where you can basically engage Savannah. No money, no. No monthly payment. You could forget about us for five years until we write you a check. I mean, it's, as Sanjay likes to say, internally a lot. It's red meat for bitcoiners.
- [16:30]
A
Sanjay. Chase mentioned about the wait list and the initial demand. Any other. Anything else to add on on that side or early feedback? And also anything that was kind of unexpected either to the upside or downside
- [16:48]
B
along the journey here, honestly. And as we were designing the product, and I do call it red meat for bitcoiners, I was quite confident that this would be something that bitcoiners liked because the probability that we assign to bitcoin not being up at some point in the next five years is low. And so I wasn't concerned at all. And the demand, as Chase just said, is coming in very strong. All we did was present it at the bitcoin conference. We purposely haven't done a ton of marketing since then precisely because we're now working with capital partners to see how we can match capital to the demand that we have. And that's actually one thing I really love about Silvana. Everything I've mentioned so far is just half the story. Trying to get folks who are already orange pilled. Our customers, our real estate owners, they're already orange pilled by the time they get to our front door. What I also love about Silvana is that I think we've got something really, really compelling for capital that isn't as orange pilled, maybe this capital. And this is the most capital in the world, right? That's why we see most of bitcoin's growth ahead of us. Most of tradfi is still coming into bitcoin maybe with some apprehension. And so to them, to our capital partners, we say, here's a way to get into this asset class, this asset that you've been maybe tiptoeing around, maybe you've been intrigued by it. You're seeing more and more adoption, you're hearing more and more of your friends raving about it. Here's a way for you to get into this asset class with a safety net, with the, with the downside protection. So we're making it easy for tradfi as well to get into an asset that, that they, they have. I mean, it's still novel, right? To you and me it's not. But to a lot of the world, to a lot of traffi, it's still a novel asset class and they still think of it as risky, right? Maybe they may even think existential risks exist in bitcoin. And that's what I really love about is sort of bringing these two sides together. I think of our real estate owners, our customers, as high conviction. They have a lot of conviction, but they don't have the capital. And our capital partners have a lot of capital, less conviction. And so they're both unable to leap further into bitcoin, right? The real estate, our customers just don't have the money. They've got real estate equity, but they don't have the money. And our capital providers have the money. They just don't have the conviction to make that leap. So by bringing them together, and that's why I love, you know, it's a play on bips, but I love this idea of it being a partnership. If you bring those two sides together, they can both together make that leap where one protects the other and one provides capital to the other. And so it really is a two sided, it's a two sided market here that we're making. And we've been focused since our announcement at Bitcoin 2025 in bringing those two sides, finding the capital partners to fund the bitcoin purchases.
- [20:31]
A
What are the best touch points for people to reach out, learn more, what is the process as far as they go to Savana IO, I believe, and then maybe set up a call with someone to ask questions and kind of try to wrap their arms around everything. Or can you maybe walk us through the process?
- [20:54]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So we are building out, and as Chase said, this is something we really want to do a good job on, which we want to have the best closing experience in the world. So the first step would be Savana IO, make sure you understand fully the parameters, the terms of the product. By the way, simplicity is something we really strive for. The product is almost too simple. Sometimes when I explain it to folks, they assume, oh, maybe there's an interest rate here and what's accruing, and da, da, da, da, da. And it's like, no, no, no, it really is. I buy the bitcoin, Solana buys a bitcoin, you get half of the upside as long as you promise to cover the downside. And so we actually wanted even everything about the product to be on the front page without you having to scroll. You just go to Silvana IO. It's really everything you know about the product is there. We've also got a little calculator so you can see exactly how the math works. You can put in your property value, how much debt you have on the property, your prediction for what's going to happen to bitcoin, and so on. Yeah. So just so monadaio, get onto our wait list and we'll take it from there.
- [22:17]
A
I'm trying to think through this like a customer. If somebody comes to you, they do a bip and it's two years later and they say, okay, bitcoin doubled. I'm out, I'd like my check. And then the next day they go, I want to do it again. Can they just, like, do it again the next day? Or how does that work?
- [22:37]
B
Yeah, absolutely. We would go through our closing process again. Right now we're anticipating the closing process taking 20 to 30 days, but we really want to try to bring that down as much as possible. There's certain somewhat hard limits we're up against when it comes to real estate, but, yeah, you're welcome to do that. We do have certain costs associated with closing, just like with any real estate transaction. But, yeah, it might make sense to do that if you're up a Lot on your position.
- [23:10]
C
Yeah. Another reason, Tim, it might make sense to do that in the future is if you've paid off more of your mortgage and your home has appreciated in value. Now that total starting investment amount has actually gone up.
- [23:22]
B
And, Chase, when you said appreciate and value, that made me think of something very important about Silvana, something I really like about Silvana worth mentioning, and that is we, Silvana, do not participate in your home appreciation. There are certain products out there where you essentially sell or give up a piece of your home. And, you know, I love all paths of bitcoin, right? Different products are right for different people. So not good and bad. It's just what's right for you. But there are certain products out there where you are giving up a piece of your home and the appreciation of that piece. Silvana does not participate at all in the appreciation of your home. The lien that we put on your home, like Chase said earlier, is simply to secure the payment that you would owe us. In this scenario, where you end when bitcoin's down from when you started, right? That's the only reason we put a lien on your home. It's a fixed dollar lien, and we rip it up if the position ends up. We're writing you the check in that scenario. And we also rip it up if at the end of the term, if the position is down, you pay us like you agreed, we rip up that lean as well.
- [24:46]
A
Chase, what are we missing here?
- [24:47]
C
I think. I think we've covered it. Like Sanjay said, sometimes it's. It's too simple. I mean, everybody wants to understand the inner workings behind the scenes because at first glance, it does sound too good to be true, you know, oh, you know, come to us. We'll record a lien on your property. We'll buy the bitcoin, we'll pay you out in the future when, you know, bitcoin will be worth more than it is today. It's too good to be true. So people inevitably want to dig deeper. But I think once people realize that on the other side of that trade is a pool of capital that is Bitcoin. Curious. Want some of that asymmetric upside, but needs to feel like they have full downside protection in the bitcoin goes to zero scenario, it starts to make sense that they're being matched by Savannah. In many ways, we're kind of a matchmaker, or making the market, if you will. But I guess if I was to leave everybody with one thing, I would say go to YouTube, search Savannah Bitcoin 2025 and watch Sanjay and Vijay Boyupati on Stage at Bitcoin 2025 in less than 10 minutes. Explain this in phenomenal detail. It's what, you know, Savannah pilled me, if you will. It got me excited, and not only as the homeowner, but I'm also excited about the capital pools that Savannah can help bring into this monetary network. So definitely go and watch that video. It's obviously featured@SavannahIO as well. And I would say don't sleep on the wait list. We take the wait list seriously. We're doing our best to honor the folks that have been with us the longest and try to fund their positions first. There's no guarantees, but we really do try to look to the wait list and honor that. So please don't hesitate to sign up for your multiple properties.
- [26:36]
A
Ideally, maybe that's an important detail. Which property types qualify, don't qualify. Any other details in that sphere that would be helpful for folks?
- [26:49]
B
Yeah. So we work with residential properties and we are prioritizing investment properties. So these are rental properties or secondary homes. We eventually want to get to primary residences. But right now, our focus as we start Silvana is investment properties. But please submit your property, whether it's an investment property or a primary residence, we want to get to you eventually.
- [27:22]
A
Is there anything else on the roadmap as far as additional aspects of all of this, additional products, or. It seems like the TAM here is big enough that could keep you busy for a little while.
- [27:36]
B
The TAM is enormous, but also this moment in time is really a gift. It's really a blessing. When I presented at Bitcoin 2025, we were a hundred ish, right. 100 plus. Or actually, you know, sort of in that neighborhood. Right. I can't remember exactly now. And. And this drawdown couldn't have been better timed. And so we're working extra hard to get as much capital from our capital providers as possible. There's a flip side of that in a way, right. For. For bitcoiners, we just want to get in as soon as possible. When we see prices like this for tradfi, they can get nervous. Right. The more bitcoin dips, the more apprehension. Tradfi investor, who may not be as comfortable with bitcoin as you and I are. So there is a flip side to that, but we're trying to work as quickly as we can to fund as much as we can right now.
- [28:48]
A
Are there any conferences, events over the next coming months that you guys are going to be attending where people can plan on shaking your hand or anything else of note that's kind of coming up over the next quarter or two.
- [29:01]
B
Yeah. I mean, we want to be in Vegas again. Nothing definitive yet, but we really want to try to make it out there again. So hope to see as many of you as possible. Yeah.
- [29:13]
C
And son and Sanjay's and team are based in Miami, and Sanjay is usually happy to grab a coffee as well.
- [29:20]
B
Oh, yeah. Anytime.
- [29:22]
A
Super. Appreciate the time today. Chase and Sanjay, any final thoughts and any other touch points that you want us to tag in the pod here?
- [29:31]
B
No, this has been great. Thanks for the opportunity to share, Savannah.
- [29:35]
C
Yeah. Thank you, Tim.
- [29:37]
A
Absolutely. Thank you, guys.