Using "cash flow, efficiency, market size" to judge, rather than just "cycles, emotions" to measure.
Author: btyc
Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
The current financial market is being driven by two structural forces: on one hand, the "Great Beautiful Policy" (referring to the economic stimulus policies of the U.S. through interest rate cuts and credit easing) is fully supporting the real estate industry, which occupies a core position of nearly 20% of U.S. GDP; on the other hand, the on-chain of real assets (RWA tokenization) is moving mortgages and credit assets onto the blockchain, directly challenging the traditional financial market, which exceeds $12 trillion in scale.
Figure is betting on these two levers: it relies on the policy dividends of "Made in USA" while also working to build on-chain infrastructure, attempting to reshape transparency and efficiency in the mortgage and real estate finance sectors. The key question is whether this model can move from small-scale pilots to mainstream or will be limited by structural issues such as insufficient liquidity, governance, and regulation.
Team and Capital Background
CEO Mike Cagney, co-founder of SoFi, pushed the lending scale to over $50 billion during his tenure at SoFi, moving student loans and mortgages online, effectively pulling these businesses out of traditional banks and directly opening the FinTech era. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later obtained a Sloan Fellow qualification at Stanford Graduate School of Business, specializing in applied economics and management. For him, Figure is not a completely new startup but a continuation of SoFi's unfinished vision—"asset digitization and on-chain"—towards the mainstream financial market.
COO June Ou previously served as the Chief Operating Officer of SoFi, responsible for risk management and compliance, personally handling the strictest regulatory challenges. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in computer science and mathematics, skilled in transforming engineers' code into regulatory-compliant products.
Figure is backed by equally heavyweight capital, including Ribbit, DST Global, and a16z. Notably, a16z established a $7.5 billion blockchain and related industry investment fund as early as 2018, successfully betting on Coinbase, Solana, Uniswap, and OpenSea, becoming a major proponent of the "Real World Assets (RWA)" narrative. Figure's support from a16z is not only a financial boost but also a key script connecting Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Web3 world.
Pain Points of Traditional Real Estate Mortgages
To understand why Figure chose to enter this market, one must first recognize the structural issues of traditional real estate mortgages. This market is worth up to $12 trillion, yet its operation still remains in the "paper process + multiple intermediaries" era.
Low Liquidity and Efficiency
A mortgage typically takes 30 to 60 days from application to disbursement, involving document review, credit assessment, asset registration, and multiple signatures. For borrowers, this means a long wait and high transaction costs; for investors, it represents capital stagnation and insufficient asset allocation efficiency.
Excessive Intermediaries
Banks are the first layer, but behind them are credit rating agencies, custodians, investment banks, and secondary market investors. Each layer extracts fees while prolonging the settlement process. This structure leads to a vicious cycle of "high costs, lack of transparency, and low efficiency."
Insufficient Transparency
Investors often cannot grasp the real status of collateral in real-time and can only rely on reports from rating agencies or descriptions from banks. This information asymmetry has proven to be a significant systemic risk during past financial crises.
Figure's Solutions and Challenges
In the face of the inefficiencies and lack of transparency in the traditional mortgage market, Figure proposes a solution: to reconstruct the process using blockchain. It does not attempt to completely abandon existing financial mechanisms but seeks to find a new path between "compliance and efficiency."
Technological Innovation: Figure has built a dedicated blockchain using the Cosmos SDK and verifies transactions through a Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, reducing the mortgage settlement time from the original 30 to 60 days to just a few days or even hours. Additionally, Figure standardizes processes such as loans, mortgages, and payments into smart contracts, allowing mortgages to be executed automatically and packaged, traded, or split in a modular way in the secondary market. This provides institutional investors with a more flexible toolbox than traditional securitization.
Another key aspect is open-source. Figure's core protocol is based on the Cosmos SDK, featuring auditable and verifiable characteristics, which is particularly important in the blockchain field for several reasons:
Different Sources of Trust: Traditional finance relies on regulatory and intermediary endorsements, while blockchain's trust comes from code and consensus mechanisms. If the code is not open-source, external parties cannot verify its security and fairness.
Community Co-creation: Open-source can attract developers and institutions to participate, creating network effects and preventing technology from being locked within a single company.
Regulatory Scrutiny: Regulatory agencies or auditing bodies can inspect open-source code to confirm its transparency and security, thereby reducing the risk of opaque operations.
Compared to the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism of the Bitcoin network, Figure's PoS model emphasizes efficiency and energy consumption advantages:
PoW Mechanism: Relies on computational power competition to ensure security, high energy consumption but strong decentralization and resistance to censorship.
PoS Mechanism: Determines validation rights through "staking," enabling quick transaction processing and reduced energy consumption, more aligned with financial application scenarios.
However, this design also faces some challenges:
Governance Risks: PoS can easily allow large holders to gain excessive influence, leading to centralization issues of "voting with money."
Insufficient Node Distribution: Currently, validation nodes are still biased towards a few institutions, raising concerns about "on-chain packaged centralized finance."
Compliance Transparency: Although Figure's team and investor backgrounds help in dialogues with regulatory agencies, its on-chain disclosure levels have not yet reached the standards of traditional public markets.
In my view, the benefits of this design far outweigh the drawbacks. It represents a disruptive innovation and a "relatively optimal solution" for market symbiosis. Overall, Figure enhances efficiency and transparency through smart contracts, open-source protocols, and PoS mechanisms; but its challenge lies in whether it can still gain long-term trust from the market and institutions under the pressures of governance centralization and compliance scrutiny.
Competitors and Differentiation
There are numerous products in the market attempting to "reshape finance," and RWA (real asset tokenization) has always been a hot area. To understand Figure's positioning, one must not only compare within the crypto circle but also place it back into two maps: traditional finance and DeFi (decentralized finance) along with RWA.
In the traditional financial system, the U.S. mortgage market is dominated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which package assets through mortgage-backed securities (MBS) for secondary market investors. The drawbacks have been detailed in the previous text—this is a large-scale but inefficient "pipeline system," struggling to meet today's financial market demands for immediacy and transparency. Figure's entry point is precisely to digitize and put this pipeline on-chain, making it transparent and verifiable at any time.
In the Web3 space, there are already some protocols focusing on RWA and DeFi:
Ondo Finance standardizes low-risk fixed-income assets like U.S. Treasuries and money market funds on-chain (e.g., OUSG, USDY), forming an "on-chain liquidity management" infrastructure aimed at institutions and crypto-native capital, currently leading in scale among similar protocols. However, its asset range is biased towards short-term debt and liquidity management, differing from the "long cycle, large volume, complex process" structure of mortgages.
Maple Finance focuses on the institutional loan market, serving crypto-native companies through on-chain funding pools, with long-term loan balances in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. It provides credit loan channels within the crypto circle, but the borrower range is still mainly concentrated in the crypto ecosystem, disconnected from traditional finance.
Centrifuge primarily tokenizes assets like accounts receivable and small business loans, bringing non-volatile collateral to DeFi. Its total value locked (TVL) is in the hundreds of millions, proving the feasibility of tokenization, but it remains limited to niche assets, far from the mainstream mortgage market.
On the other end, the on-chaining of traditional asset management giants is rapidly taking shape:
BlackRock｜BUIDL (USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) is an on-chain tokenized liquidity fund issued by Securitize, with AUM exceeding $1 billion by March 13, 2025; accepted as collateral by several crypto platforms like Crypto.com and Deribit starting June 18, 2025; mid-year reports indicated its AUM was around $2 billion, and a market snapshot on September 18, 2025, still showed around $1.9 billion, becoming one of the de facto standards for on-chain U.S. dollar money funds.
Franklin Templeton｜BENJI (Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, FOBXX) is the first U.S. registered money fund to record shares on a public chain, investing ≥99.5% in government securities, cash, and fully collateralized repurchase agreements. By September 2025, its asset size was approximately $730–740 million; on September 18, 2025, it partnered with DBS and Ripple (XRP) to launch sgBENJI in Singapore, supporting trading/borrowing on DBS Digital Exchange and exploring the use of tokens as collateral.
The commonality among these protocols is the push for a fully DeFi logic: transparent processes, community governance, and avoidance of traditional regulation. Their technical approach typically involves packaging "existing legal rights (fund shares, SPV debt rights, notes)" into compliance-restricted on-chain tokens, then integrating institutional funds through real-name authentication (KYC) and whitelisting, "NAV/cash flow oracles," and "restricted transfer standards." The advantages lie in verifiability, composability, and automation; the limitations are in legal and regulatory boundaries, asset due diligence difficulties, and the gap with core traditional financial assets.
Core Differences Between Figure and Competitors
Positioning and Scope Figure does not simply "package" existing assets onto the blockchain; instead, it standardizes the entire mortgage operation chain from "asset generation → registration → contracts → services → settlement → secondary circulation" into open-source smart contracts, primarily targeting the long-cycle, process-heavy main channel of U.S. mortgages.
Asset Class Comparison Figure directly addresses core assets like mortgages; Centrifuge and Maple focus on private credit and accounts receivable; Ondo concentrates on U.S. Treasuries/money market funds, leaning more towards liquidity and asset allocation scenarios.
Compliance and Access Strategy Figure adopts an institution-friendly strategy, embedding itself within the existing financial system (custody, KYC, service provider integration); many DeFi-RWA solutions, on the other hand, primarily rely on community governance and token packaging, resulting in lower coupling with traditional finance.
Infrastructure Depth Figure attempts to reconstruct the stacking of primary and secondary mortgage markets end-to-end; protocols like Ondo mainly focus on standardizing existing products on-chain and facilitating circulation, with limited involvement in front-end aspects like origin/services.
Technology and Auditability Figure emphasizes open-source, verifiable, and auditable processes, akin to opening a transparent factory where everything from input to output can be observed; other RWA protocols resemble outsourced manufacturing, where you see the finished product but need to inquire with several manufacturers about the process.
In conclusion, while competitors remain at the "hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, crypto-native or liquidity management" stage, Figure is one of the few players attempting to establish "U.S. mortgages" as a core asset on-chain infrastructure. Whether it is "unique" depends on whether compliance and institutional adoption can materialize, but in terms of asset scope and infrastructure depth, Figure has clearly delineated itself from mainstream DeFi protocols and is closer to a "blockchain version of infrastructure" in its division of labor with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac rather than a single product.
In simple terms, Figure is "building roads" rather than "selling cars"; the key to success lies in compliance and institutional adoption.
Market Size and Prospects
Underlying Market & Cyclical Tailwinds
Mortgage Market Size
The U.S. household mortgage balance is approximately $13-14 trillion, with the annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the secondary market reaching $1.19 trillion (a year-on-year increase of 21.7%), and the average daily trading volume of agency MBS is $345.1 billion, showing significant recovery in trading flow.
Interest Rate Turning Point
The 30-year mortgage rate has dropped to 6.39% (as of the week ending September 12, 2025), with the market generally expecting the Federal Reserve to initiate interest rate cuts, leading to a rebound in refinance applications, creating structural benefits for home equity lines of credit (HELOC) and refinancing.
Annual Loan Volume (MBA Forecast)
The total loan volume for 2025 is expected to be $2.1-2.3 trillion, a significant rebound compared to 2024. Each 50-100 basis point reduction in interest rates will further amplify refinancing elasticity, driving issuance and transactions in the secondary market.
Figure's Actual Growth Rate
Revenue Performance: Figure achieved net revenue of $191 million in the first half of 2025 (a year-on-year increase of 22.4%), turning a profit during the same period with a net profit of $29 million.
Loan Momentum: As of June 30, 2025, the total amount of Figure's home equity loans (including HELOC) was approximately $6 billion, with an annual growth of nearly 30%; of this, $1.3 billion was achieved through the Figure Connect platform via market-based matching.
Capital Market Validation: In June 2025, Figure completed $355 million in on-chain HELOC securitization (FIGRE 2025-HE3), marking the first combination to receive AAA ratings across all tranches from S&P, broadening the participation scope for institutional investors.
Listing Benchmark: Figure went public on NASDAQ on September 11, 2025, raising $787.5 million, with an IPO valuation of approximately $5.29 billion.
Efficiency → Cost → Gross Margin: Why On-Chain is "More Viable"
Settlement Time: The circulation cycle of the traditional secondary market is T+30 to 60 days, while on-chain standardization and smart contracts can compress the process to within a day or several days, reducing idle capital and labor costs.
Actual Cost Savings: Official data and case studies indicate that each transaction can save hundreds of dollars or over 100 basis points in total process costs, and this scale of savings can extend to the automation of issuance, servicing, and refinancing.
Interoperability Benefits: When debt is tokenized with transfer restrictions and made transferable through whitelisting, it can form collateral and short-term financing "capital efficiency overlays" with on-chain money market funds like BUIDL, BENJI, and OUSG, transforming traditional "idle cash" into T+0/T+1 liquid fund shares, further enhancing gross margins.
Valuation Backcast: 1-Year / 5-Year Scenarios
Revenue Benchmark: Based on the first half of 2025's revenue of $191 million, the projected full-year revenue is $380-420 million, taking the median of $400 million as the benchmark.
Equity Benchmark: Based on the IPO valuation of $5.29 billion and an issue price of $25, the circulating share capital is approximately 212 million shares (not including future issuances or SBC dilution).
A) 1-Year Target (by 2026) Revenue Assumptions (reflecting interest rate cuts and market share increases):
Bear: +15% → $460 million
Base: +25% → $500 million
Bull: +35% → $540 million
Valuation Method: Using EV/Sales corresponding to the growth premium of FinTech/RWA during cyclical upturns:
- Bear: 9x; Base: 14x; Bull: 18x
Market Cap = PS × Revenue; Share Price = Market Cap / Share Capital
Using 212 million shares for calculations:
Bear: $4.14 billion → $19.5/share
Base: $7 billion → $33.0/share
Bull: $9.72 billion → $45.9/share
If considering dilution to 230 million shares: Bear $18.0 / Base $30.4 / Bull $42.3.
B) 5-Year Target (by 2030) Revenue CAGR Assumptions (on-chain penetration × product expansion):
Bear: +15% CAGR → $804.5 million
Base: +25% CAGR → $1.221 billion
Bull: +35% CAGR → $1.7936 billion
Valuation Method: In the mature stage, using a more convergent EV/Sales (de-bubble):
- Bear: 6x; Base: 8x; Bull: 10x
Using 212 million shares / 230 million shares for calculations:
Bear: $4.83 billion → $22.8 / $21.0
Base: $9.77 billion → $46.1 / $42.5
Bull: $17.9 billion → $84.6 / $78.0
Intuitive Interpretation: Interest rate cuts bring volume, while on-chain efficiency enhances productivity. If Figure can implement verifiable, composable open-source contracts for "loan origination—services—securitization—secondary circulation," and as institutions incorporate BUIDL/BENJI/OUSG into the collateral ecosystem, the transmission from efficiency to gross margin to valuation multiples will be smoother. Conversely, if interest rates remain sticky and compliance and adoption slow, multiples will converge to lower ranges.
This section's model is based on revenue × EV/Sales, with multiples derived from historical distributions of peer ranges and cyclical positions; it does not include temporary multiple expansions driven by FOMO or narrative. If narrative premiums (such as media attention, unilateral capital inflows, or passive allocations by indices or institutions) emerge in the future, their impact will primarily be reflected in upward multiple shifts rather than short-term cash flow improvements, thus not serving as a baseline.
Strategic Focus and Risk Switch
Dual Tailwinds from Policy and Infrastructure
More Predictable Policy Environment: The federal-level GENIUS Act for stablecoins has been signed into law, laying the groundwork for "restricted transfer + KYC whitelisting" compliant tokenized assets; the new SEC chair Paul Atkins' regulatory tone leans towards "clear rules and predictable enforcement," which is favorable for institutions to adopt on-chain tools within compliance. These two changes have shifted the discussion of "moving existing processes on-chain" from feasibility to institutional implementation.
Expansion of Institutional Collateral Interoperability: BlackRock's BUIDL has been accepted as trading collateral by Crypto.com and Deribit; Franklin Templeton and DBS/Ripple have launched sgBENJI, allowing qualified investors to trade and borrow on the DBS Digital Exchange and explore collateral uses. These milestones indicate that the channel for "compliant funds ↔ on-chain collateral" is taking shape, creating external conditions for Figure's future secondary circulation and capital efficiency.
Overlapping Narrative Levels: Figure simultaneously holds the triple labels of Made in USA × RWA × FinTech; in the context of the Republican government's emphasis on onshore financial innovation and digital dollarization, it stands as a beneficiary at the intersection of policy and industry narratives.
Promising "Landscape": The real estate market is indeed large, but the benefits have already been anticipated by the market, as this is a field that everyone can see and understand. What is truly worth looking forward to is whether future loans will be offered for purchasing other assets (like Bitcoin) or whether collateralizing Bitcoin will increase loan limits.
Risks: On-Chain Does Not Equal Immunity to External Variables
"Hard Liquidity" of Real Estate: Depends on judicial disposal and market depth; what can be compressed on-chain is the operational process, but it cannot change the disposal cycle. As of the second quarter of 2025, the average time to complete a foreclosure in the U.S. is still about 645 days. Once the housing market weakens, Figure's acceleration may shorten the turnover cycle, and the cash recovery from disposals may not match the pace of liabilities, which traditional giants are more resilient against.
Regulatory and Policy Path Dependence: Although the GENIUS Act lays the foundation, other supporting bills (such as the CLARITY Act) are still progressing in Congress; while the SEC's regulatory attitude has shifted to "predictable," the experience of the former SEC chair reminds us that officials' tones and focuses may still fluctuate with personnel changes and events, and short-term volatility cannot be ignored. Narratives are not cash flow, and the sustainability of valuations still depends on the details of the rules and the speed of adoption.
Technical Governance and Concentration: The PoS mechanism brings high efficiency but also carries the risk of staking concentration and excessive concentration of governance power; financial-grade applications need to achieve a more stable balance between "throughput—decentralization—operational risk" and gain market trust through open-source and continuous external audits.
Author's Statement
I am an old friend of blockchain, having participated early on and witnessed its journey, and I have always believed in it. But to be honest, apart from buying and selling real estate and studying mortgage rates, I have not engaged with real estate-related stocks, which is my shortcoming.
I also need to confess a bias: I have long viewed the blockchain-related market with a "four-year cycle" mindset. In the last cycle, I gradually profited and exited during the listing frenzy of Mara / Coinbase / Riot, and this experience has made me more alert. I ask myself every day, "Is this time really different?" This vigilance has helped me avoid several severe downturns, but it may also have made me overly conservative towards new things.
Figure has made me rethink many things. It is not about shouting coin prices or "hollow narratives," but quietly rewriting financial processes. The user experience is like that of a regular bank; if you don't dig deep, you might not even realize that its underlying technology is blockchain. I like this feeling of "technical invisibility, normal experience," which means the market is genuinely accepting it rather than being educated about it. Therefore, I remind myself that blockchain ≠ cryptocurrency. I should judge based on "cash flow, efficiency, market size," rather than just measuring with "cycles, emotions."
My biggest concern lies in the potential volatility caused by the SEC's regulatory attitude mentioned earlier. Ethereum (ETH) has seen its price performance resemble a roller coaster in recent years due to the SEC's repeated stance changes, even becoming "soft" for a long time, almost missing the entire bull market. So for Figure, I tend to test with small amounts and pay attention to whether more confident signals emerge later.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
