Mike Cagney has been here before, just not with blockchain.
In the early 2010s, he helped reshape consumer lending with SoFi by connecting borrowers directly with capital. Now, at Figure Technology Solutions (FIGR), he said he’s trying to do something similar on a much larger scale: rebuilding the infrastructure of the credit markets themselves.
The plan may work. The number crossed $1 billion in monthly loan originations for the first time in March, part of a $2.9 billion first quarter that puts the company at about $12 billion in annual volume.
Cagney, speaking at the Consensus Miami conference next week, told CoinDesk the goal is to build new plumbing for those markets.
“We’re building a marketplace where credit can move efficiently without all the traditional layers,” he said.
Three handles of value
Cagney broke Figure’s model down into three core benefits.
The first is cost. Tokenization of loans reduces the friction and cost of securitization, cutting out middlemen who have historically charged significant fees.
The second is liquidity. Figure has built what it describes as one of the only continuously updating marketplaces for consumer credit outside of government-backed mortgage lending systems like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“The loans are updated in real time, which creates a different kind of market,” Cagney said.
The third is access. By bringing these assets onchain, Figure can put them into decentralized finance (DeFi), allowing a wider range of investors to gain exposure or borrow against them.
This is where the model begins to blur the line between traditional finance and crypto, Cagney said.
Figure’s latest push is what Cagney calls “democratized prime,” essentially opening up prime brokerage-style lending to a wider audience.
Through products like its Forge platform, loans are collected in standardized boxes and converted into tokens that can be used as collateral in DeFi protocols. That standardization is key.
“DeFi only works if the security is liquid and transparent,” he said.
Figure has launched related initiatives on networks like Solana, with plans to expand to Ethereum, allowing users to invest in tokenized credit pools or borrow against them.
The company is also experimenting beyond loans.
It has introduced a yield-bearing stablecoin, YLDS, backed by traditional assets like Treasurys, with around $600 million in balances, and is exploring tokenized shares, issuing its own stock onchain in a way that allows investors to borrow directly against it.
Cagney pointed to strong inefficiencies in traditional markets. Stock lending can have loan interest rates of 30% or more, while investors often receive only a fraction of this yield.
“We can put that value back into the hands of the asset owner,” he said.
Pragmatic blockchain
Despite all the ambitions, Cagney is quick to draw boundaries.
Not everything belongs on the chain, he said. Tokenization of property itself, for example, may not be an efficient use of capital. But financial abstraction, meaning loans, securities and equity, is a different story.
That pragmatism reflects a broader criticism of the crypto industry, which he said has often chased ideas without clear economic grounding.
“A lot of things were done just for the sake of it,” he said. “What matters is, does this actually improve the system?”
The figure’s growth suggests, at least in one corner of the market, that the answer may be yes. The company is profitable, scaling and approaching $30 billion in cumulative originations. That’s still small compared to traditional funding, but it’s big enough to be noticed.
Cagney said he sees a lot more room to run.
“Blockchain is the most transformative technology, and it will redistribute more public market value than any technology has ever done,” he said. “There are entire industries that are going to disappear when it becomes ubiquitous. Someone has to do the work to get there, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Read more: Private credit could be an outbreak of tokenization: Maple’s Sidney Powell
