Figure’s CEO isn’t waiting for Wall Street, but finding public companies who need their tokenization network

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Since 2018, Figure’s business has mostly involved offering mortgages or home equity line of credit (HELOC). But over the past few years, the company has expanded its remit within crypto, especially on the tokenization front. 

Figure has spent the past couple of years building its case for bringing mortgages onchain and focusing on tokenization, its CEO Michael Tannenbaum shared on Token Relations’ Talking Tokens podcast. 

Today, the company processes about $1 billion in tokenized mortgages every month, per Tannenbaum, who says its system can originate a mortgage roughly $1,000, or 92% cheaper than the industry average of around $12,000. 

The company went public in Q3 of 2025, and in Q4 saw its revenue increase 100% to $157.6 million compared to a year earlier. 

"The public markets are looking at blockchain as the future of finance," he said. "And there actually aren't that many ways to bet on that. Certainly as a public markets investor, there's very few."

Riding the momentum from its strong lending business, Figure is now turning its attention to equities. Figure launched its onchain public equity network, OPEN, in January in an effort to help handle issuance, settlement and stock lending through blockchain rails, instead of traditional stock trading avenues. 

Tannenbaum believes there’s opportunity in bringing tokenized equities in spaces where blockchain enables alpha to be made. "There are digital asset treasury companies that are trading well below NAV. There are companies that are heavily shorted," he said. "A CEO who's got a heavily shorted stock is saying to all his shareholders, ‘Come onto this blockchain version, at least you're going to benefit from the short interest because you can make 20%, 30% lending out the shares.’" That niche is where onchain equity can find its first true believers, he added. 

To test this theory out, Figure brought its mortgage business onchain and tokenized it. After a few years of iteration, it expanded the model to the rest of the market to see if it would stick there, too. Its equity business is following the same playbook, Tannenbaum said, and it has launched Figure's own stock on OPEN before expanding the platform to other issuers.

"It's really hard to get other people to do something that doesn't yet work," Tannenbaum said. "People don't want to be the guinea pig." 

But tokenization grows into a buzzword, Tannenbaum thinks it’s important to draw a clear boundary between what the mechanism is, and isn’t. 

"Historically, the delta has been about crypto for crypto's sake versus using crypto to solve problems in the real world," he said. "But today, I see tokenization getting wrapped up in some of that hype and hysteria, and it’s now tokenization for tokenization's sake." 

He says some investment bankers have called him asking to put obscure assets onchain, as if the blockchain itself would create demand. 

"Just because you tokenize something doesn't mean you make it liquid or desirable," he said. "In fact, they're probably less desirable because the blockchain capital markets are small today."

With this in mind, Tannenbaum says OPEN wants to start with assets that should have deep liquidity but are fragmented, and he named mortgages as a prime example. "You need liquidity to make tokenization valuable," he said.

On a 10 year horizon, he expects most capital markets infrastructure to move onchain. "Tokenization is inevitable," he said. "It's the future of finance. It takes folks like Figure and others showing the market that you can save time, you can save costs with it. Eventually those benefits are going to eat the market."

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure, about how the company processes over $1 billion in mortgages monthly and why it went public in 2025. Michael, who was first employee at Brex and chief revenue officer at SoFi before joining Figure in 2024, explains why the company tokenized its own stock first to prove the model works before approaching other issuers.

He walks through Figure's 100% year-over-year growth with 50% margins by using blockchain tech to cut mortgage origination costs, why tokenization is now part of the buying criteria for capital markets, and the difference between creating liquidity versus just tokenizing assets. The conversation covers the Provenance blockchain, OPEN launch and demand, its DeFi marketplace, and why private credit needs institutional owners for long-term assets rather than retail investors.

TIMESTAMPS 

00:00 – Intro

01:17 – Career path: SoFi chief revenue officer, first employee at Brex, now Figure CEO

03:21 – Why Michael bet on Brex

05:09 – Reconnecting with Mike Cagney on Figure

08:41 – His framework for building through crypto and fintech cycles

10:34 – Figure's IPO timing and being publicly traded while building onchain markets

15:56 – Why Figure tokenized its own stock first before approaching other companies

18:35 – Liquidity in tokenization: just because you tokenize doesn't mean it's liquid

22:00 – Launching with Figure’s own inventory to avoid guinea pig problem

23:26 – What it means to have “hair on fire” problems

25:37 – When to emphasize blockchain benefits versus meeting skeptics where they are

27:26 – Breaking the rule of 40: 100% growth with 50% margins using blockchain technology

28:27 – Revenue growth: 100% year-over-year across mortgages, stablecoins, and DeFi marketplace

33:11 – Capital markets highway thesis: blockchain infrastructure not SaaS as next fintech model

46:26 – Watching private credit nervousness around retail investor redemptions

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