A startup founded by a former Polychain Capital president and an ex-Blackstone real estate principal has raised $50 million to build what its backers say investors have lacked: a single, liquid way to own exposure to U.S. home prices. Index Industries emerged from stealth Nov. 10 with a seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Polychain Capital, Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and other institutional investors.
The first product built on its technology, a token called USHP, cannot be bought by Americans. Its issuer says it will be offered only to eligible institutional and non-U.S. investors.
A daily U.S. home price index, made tradable
Index Industries’ first offering is the U.S. Home Price Index, or USHP Index, a proprietary benchmark the company says is calculated daily and “integrates data from the major housing indices into a single national measure.” The established gauges it competes with, such as the FHFA House Price Index and the Case-Shiller indices, are published monthly and with a lag. The company says the USHP Index is “expected to launch imminently” and is intended for market research, reporting, portfolio monitoring and housing-linked financial products.
The investable layer comes from a separate entity. In a release dated Nov. 11, the USHP Foundation, a Cayman Islands foundation company, announced the upcoming launch of USHP, which it describes as “the first tokenized liquid index product tracking U.S. home prices.” It will be issued by USHP Limited, a British Virgin Islands subsidiary, on the Ethereum blockchain in the fourth quarter, with expansion to Solana planned for 2027.
The foundation compares the product to SPY, the exchange-traded fund that made the S&P 500 investable in one trade. It says USHP is fully backed by reserve assets “which are primarily housing-related,” and that holders can earn additional yield through an income-bearing version called USHPi. The foundation reports institutional commitments of up to $100 million, anchored by the Galaxy Sharplink Onchain Yield Fund and Nasdaq-listed Forward Industries.
Index Industries stresses that it is not the issuer. It “will not offer, sell, distribute, market, redeem, or accept subscriptions for USHP,” its release states; the company manages the index and supplies the tokenization technology and real estate and capital markets services.
Who is behind it
Josh Rosenthal, Index Industries’ co-founder and CEO, was previously president and general partner of crypto investment firm Polychain Capital. Co-founder and chairman Brian Hardecker is a former Blackstone principal and the founder and CEO of Longmark, a residential real estate platform formed in 2021 that the release says has $2 billion in assets under management.
“Indexing is one of the most important and least celebrated innovations in modern finance. It reduces the expertise and cost barriers to investing in an entire market, which is what U.S. housing needs,” Rosenthal said in the funding announcement.
Hardecker framed the opportunity around housing’s scale: “U.S. housing is a massive market. It accounts for roughly a quarter of the aggregate value of the U.S. economy, yet it draws far less attention because there haven’t been accessible ways to take a position in it.”
Justin Overdorff, a partner at Lightspeed, said bringing “a $55 trillion asset class onchain requires traditional institutional infrastructure no crypto-native team has ever had,” and that Index Industries’ partnership with Longmark “made leading this investment an easy decision.”
Galaxy’s involvement runs deep. In an Aug. 10 post, Galaxy disclosed a $50 million commitment to USHP’s pre-launch institutional round, said Index Industries is a Galaxy Ventures portfolio company in which Galaxy and its affiliates hold equity, and said it expects to act as an institutional minter of and liquidity provider for USHP, for which it may be paid. Galaxy noted its commitment “is based on a total amount disbursed over time; actual disbursement amount may vary.”
The pitch, and the timing
The foundation’s release says major U.S. housing indices have compounded at roughly 5% a year over 50 years and roughly 7% over the past decade, and it calls housing an inflation hedge with low correlation to other markets. Those are the issuer’s characterizations, and the release itself notes the historical data are unaudited and that past performance is not indicative of future results.
The launch lands as national prices are softening. Redfin reported that U.S. home-sale prices fell 0.4% year over year in October, the first annual decline since 2023. A product that tracks a national index moves with that kind of data in both directions.
Crypto and housing finance have been converging in other ways this year, including Better and Coinbase’s crypto-backed conforming mortgage. On our reading, the test for USHP is less the technology than whether enough institutional buyers outside the U.S. want daily housing exposure to create a liquid market.
Galaxy has said it expects the underlying blockchain infrastructure eventually to support products “designed for U.S. homebuyers,” but neither company has announced such a product. For now, the founders’ bet sits squarely in the real estate technology camp: an index first, and a market later.
