Solana Money Summit 2025: Fireside Chat: Figure (Mike Cagney) & Huma Finance (Erbil Karaman)

Thank you.

Sure. When we started Figure, the motivation was that we felt blockchain was this massive transformational force for capital markets. What we wanted was a very tangible use case to bring to the market and demonstrate why blockchain mattered. We felt we could use securitization as that first use case. You could originate, aggregate, securitize assets on blockchain, save 85 basis points of cost. I went to a bunch of banks to pitch this, and universally they said, 'This is great, we love it, but be the 10th bank to do this.' So we realized we had to be the first mover. One of the challenges in being a first mover in a technology is you leave a lot of money on the table. In the very beginning, we would go out to hedge funds, created a lending platform to create assets the hedge funds wanted. The hedge funds would say, 'We'll pay you more if we don't have to deal with blockchain.' The only reason I have the lending business, doesn't have these loans is to get you on blockchain. So we used it as a forcing function. People later come in and say, 'We underwrote loans a little bit different just for them.' They'd pay us more, and that would kill the homogeneity of the product. So we had to leave a lot of money on the table until we got to an inflection point where the transactional efficiency, the liquidity, and the DeFi applications created a comparative advantage for us. I think this is one of the real challenges in the RWA ecosystem and why right now the bulk of what you see in RWA trying to come onto public chain is adversely selected. It's not great asset quality. It's not great asset stuff because they can't finance it elsewhere. The people that can finance it elsewhere to come on blockchain right now are going to leave some money on the table. If they have a longer term view like we had, they're going to hit that inflection point. It's going to become a comparative advantage and a defensive moat, but that takes time, commitment, and strategic direction.

I thought we'd get to where we are in about half the time, but that's because I'm an entrepreneur and I'm overly optimistic. Some of the things we're doing that we'll talk about in about 3 minutes, I didn't think we'd be there this quickly. But certainly originating $22 billion worth of assets on chain, running the first public blockchain securitization—those are things that we felt were achievable within the first five years of the business. We got there in six.

Yeah. So I used to have the view that there would be one L1 blockchain. The logic was always, why would you need more than one? That's evolved. My view today is you're actually going to have lots of L1s. What Provenance does really well is it handles institutional clients and institutional trading in a very efficient and effective way that doesn't necessarily lend itself to broader retail participation. The reverse is true in other L1s. What I like about the Solana ecosystem are really two things. One is it's got a great builder community. So one of the first things we did in terms of leaning in with Solana was we began minting our stablecoin called Yields, a security stablecoin, a yielding stablecoin, minting that on Solana. That's providing a fiat rail plus a legal minting security that's peer-to-peer transferable into the ecosystem. We hope to see tremendous development around that, whether it's payment infrastructure or settlement. But more recently with Hastra, we have right now $156 billion of yielding loans on public blockchain on Provenance, and we want to bring them into the DeFi ecosystem. We tested that out initially. We have a DeFi platform called Democratized Prime on Provenance. I brought $10 million of Figure loans over and financed them 200 basis points cheaper than my golden warehouse. I did it again, another $10 million, then $100 million. Now with Hastra, I think we'll do a billion. When you disintermediate the bank as the capital allocator, you create a Pareto condition where the borrower and lender both do much better. What we're trying to do with Astra is bring that yielding asset into a much broader investor community and participant community where we can create product that previously was inaccessible. The nice thing about what we've done is the underlying yield is US mortgages, backed by property. I think that is easier for people to get their arms around than the carry trade or some of the other mechanisms in which people have historically driven yield.