For a long time, the financial system has addressed trust issues through complex intermediary divisions, but this has also added high costs to transactions. With the emergence of blockchain technology, this long-standing efficiency bottleneck in the financial industry has found a new solution. In this process, Figure attempts to answer a more fundamental question: can the most expensive and hidden cost in the traditional financial system—credit cost—be significantly reduced through blockchain technology under compliance, thereby enabling real-time settlement of large-scale credit assets and efficient capital turnover? The core argument of this article is that interest rates in the traditional financial system not only reflect the price of capital but also represent the concentrated cost incurred by market participants in establishing and maintaining trust. While the division of labor among intermediaries improves system stability, it also adds transaction friction and systemic premiums. Blockchain, through distributed ledgers, cryptographic verification, and consensus mechanisms, records and confirms the existence of assets, changes in ownership, and transaction completion within the same system, eliminating traditional intermediary friction at the technical level, rather than creating speculative opportunities. Although the Web3 industry is often dominated by topics such as "crypto prices," "bubbles," and "speculation," the value of the technology itself should be evaluated based on its ability to improve efficiency, reduce credit costs, and build scalable infrastructure, rather than being obscured by speculative behavior. The long-term value of efficiency improvements far outweighs the costs of transformation. Figure's IPO embodies this logic: the market recognizes the practical value of its blockchain financial practices and symbolizes the traditional financial sector's gradual acceptance of the potential of Web3 technology. How Blockchain Reduces Lending Costs In the credit market, "cost" is often simplified to a single number—"interest rate." However, understanding lending costs solely through the level of interest rates overlooks a more fundamental question: what determines interest rates? From loan issuance and asset transfer to subsequent securitization and liquidation, the complexity of the financial system stems not from the complexity of the underlying assets themselves, but from the way trust is established and maintained among market participants. In other words, the interest rate is not merely a reflection of the price of capital, but a concentrated projection of the costs required for the entire trust-building process. In any lending transaction, compared to the amount of a single transaction, financial institutions are always truly concerned with three things: whether the collateral provided by the borrower actually exists; whether the ownership of the assets is clear and transferable; and whether the transaction is non-repudiable, thereby effectively controlling default risk. In the traditional financial system, these three issues are not guaranteed by a unified system, but are instead distributed among different intermediaries.Banks are responsible for account and asset records, custodians for asset safekeeping, clearinghouses for transaction confirmation, and auditing and rating agencies for additional credit endorsement. This division of labor has historically significantly improved the stability of the financial system and supported unprecedented wealth accumulation in human society since the Industrial Revolution. However, it has also brought unavoidable costs. Each intermediary, while resolving local credit issues within the chain, inevitably introduces new frictions and costs. As a result, credit costs are cumulative, ultimately evolving into a high systemic premium paid by the entire market to resolve mutual distrust. Tracing its roots further, the design of this trust mechanism itself determines its efficiency ceiling. Even in highly electronic modern capital markets, because the consistency of data between trading parties can only be verified after the transaction occurs, risks can only be covered by extending settlement cycles and increasing capital, making it difficult to further reduce intermediary fees and achieve instant settlement. It is against this backdrop that a new technological path—blockchain—is beginning to show its significance. In 2008, amidst the global financial crisis and the collapse of the credit system, a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a simple idea: could strangers reach an agreement on transaction outcomes without relying on any centralized intermediary? In his paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (bitcoin.org), the key issue wasn't the currency itself, but the ledger. As long as transaction records are publicly available and immutable once written, trust no longer needs to rely on the credit endorsement of a specific institution, but can be built on verifiable and enforceable rules. Blockchain, through distributed ledgers, cryptographic verification, and consensus mechanisms, achieved for the first time at the technical level: allowing the existence of assets, changes in ownership, and the completion of transactions to be simultaneously recorded and confirmed within the same system. However, technology itself doesn't automatically change the way the financial world operates. Even at the height of the blockchain hype, with almost all leading financial institutions establishing their own blockchain technology teams, very few have actually implemented it effectively. The reason is not complicated: in a highly regulated and extremely risk-averse system, no institution is willing to be the "first to try something new" and entrust its core transaction processes to a new ledger structure that has not yet been fully validated in real-world scenarios. Figure was born out of this gap.Why Figure? Before discussing Figure further, it's necessary to introduce its founding CEO and co-founder, Mike Cagney. He wasn't an entrepreneur who stumbled into the blockchain world by chance, but rather someone who has repeatedly validated his judgment across multiple sectors, including capital markets, fintech, and risk management. For him, Web3 wasn't a fleeting trend, but rather a response to fundamental problems within the financial system after years of practice. Cagney's career began within the traditional financial system. Early in his career, he served as head of derivatives trading and financial products at Wells Fargo, where he was deeply involved in structured products and risk pricing, a typical example of a financial professional who rose through the ranks of Wall Street. In 2000, he left to start his own business, founding the wealth management software company Finaplex, which was eventually acquired by Broadridge, a globally renowned fintech infrastructure provider. Subsequently, he founded the hedge fund Cabezon Investment Group, an experience that further deepened his understanding of market liquidity, risk transfer, and the mechanisms of capital market operations. Mike Cagney (Figure) truly gained widespread recognition after co-founding SoFi (Social Finance) with his Stanford classmates in 2011. SoFi initially aimed to reshape the student loan market through data and community mechanisms: allowing alumni to directly provide funds to current students, thereby reducing financing costs and improving risk pricing efficiency. Subsequently, SoFi expanded its business to areas such as personal loans and mortgages, becoming one of the most representative companies in the fintech wave. However, it was during his entrepreneurial experience at SoFi that Cagney gradually realized a deeper problem: even though fintech has significantly reduced manual processes, intermediary costs remain high. No matter how innovative the product design, as long as the registration, transfer, clearing, and settlement of underlying assets still rely on the traditional ledger system, the structural costs of large-scale financial products cannot be truly eliminated. In other words, the structural problems of the financial system can never be solved by a single product. It was against this backdrop of reflection that Cagney began to systematically focus on blockchain technology. During his time at SoFi, he repeatedly expressed publicly the potential of blockchain to reshape financial services. But as he later admitted, those views were mostly just nice "statements." It wasn't until after leaving SoFi that he truly realized the power of blockchain to restructure the core ledger structure. In 2018, Cagney and his wife June Ou co-founded Figure.Unlike most Web3 startups that start with consumer-facing applications, payment tools, or conceptual products, Figure chose a significantly more challenging path: directly addressing the most fundamental, complex, and structurally inefficient aspect of the traditional financial system—credit assets. HELOC and Provenance Figure's first core product is Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC). HELOC is essentially a revolving credit instrument secured by home equity (the current value of the property minus the outstanding loan balance). Borrowers can borrow and repay multiple times within their credit limit, with interest rates typically significantly lower than unsecured loans. Compared to ordinary consumer finance products, HELOC has several key characteristics: highly authentic assets, large amounts, long lifecycles, and inherently involves multiple highly fragmented stages throughout its lifecycle, including property valuation, mortgage registration, fund disbursement, asset transfer, and subsequent securitization. The characteristics of Figure HELOC (Figure): By natively deploying key processes such as loan generation, confirmation, transfer, and settlement on the Provenance chain, Figure enables HELOC to be tracked, split, and circulated in real time, directly connecting with institutional investors. This means that Figure does not need to keep loans on its balance sheet for extended periods like traditional banks, but can quickly sell or securitize them after disbursement, significantly improving capital turnover efficiency. More importantly, HELOC has always had a clear strategic positioning within Figure: it has never been just a single product aimed at profit, but a crucial testing ground for verifying whether blockchain can support large amounts of real credit assets under compliant conditions. Once HELOC can be successfully implemented, mortgage loans, consumer loans, and even broader asset classes can theoretically use the same underlying logic. Provenance Chain's successful cost reduction and efficiency improvement (Provenance Blockchain): It is precisely in this process that the Provenance chain has undergone a key evolution. In its early stages, Provenance adopted a highly permissioned private chain architecture to attract banks and institutional investors. This choice was not based on technological conservatism, but rather a rational judgment under practical constraints: in the initial stage of putting real financial assets on the blockchain, traditional financial institutions were not yet able to accept a fully open, decentralized public blockchain environment. Private blockchains initially provided institutional participants with an operational framework where nodes were controllable, rules were clear, and responsibilities were traceable, thus ensuring compliance and operational security. However, as the scale of HELOC assets on the blockchain continued to expand, the limitations of private blockchains gradually became apparent.While private blockchains significantly reduce transaction costs, governance remains centralized, severely limiting third-party access and ecosystem expansion. This reality directly propelled Provenance's evolution from a 1.0 private permissioned blockchain to a 2.0 decentralized public blockchain. Provenance introduced a gas fee mechanism similar to Ethereum, charging fees based on the computing resources consumed by exchanges to maintain network operation and incentivize node participants. In this process, the role of Hash tokens also shifted: from initially having more securities-like attributes, it gradually evolved into a functional token supporting ecosystem operation, not only used to pay gas fees but also undertaking the fundamental function of incentivizing ecosystem participants. Overall, with the support of blockchain technology, Figure has achieved a systematic restructuring of the HELOC issuance process. For loans under $400,000, Figure can complete the entire process online without on-site assessment. Borrowers typically receive approval within 5 minutes of submitting their application and receive disbursement within approximately 5 days—an efficiency almost unattainable in traditional financial systems. Based on this model, Figure has become the largest non-bank HELOC provider in the United States: compared to traditional banks, its loan disbursement is faster; compared to unsecured personal loans, its borrowing costs are significantly lower, reducing costs by 125 basis points per loan. To date, Figure's HELOC products have served more than 217,000 households. Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC provider in the United States. These results demonstrate that, under compliant conditions, large-scale real-world credit assets can not only be natively deployed on-chain, but also complete the entire product lifecycle more efficiently, laying a solid practical foundation for Figure's expansion into a wider range of credit and capital markets. The Myth of DeFi Before further discussing what Figure can inspire us, it is necessary to clarify a long-standing question that has plagued the Web3 industry: how should we evaluate the value of a financial technology? For the past decade or so, public discussions surrounding blockchain have almost always been dominated by keywords such as "coin price," "bubble," and "speculation." ICOs, NFTs, FTX, and other Web3-related events have reinforced the impression that blockchain is inherently linked to speculation, fraud, and irrational exuberance. However, to deny the value of blockchain itself based on this is to commit the same cognitive error as many technological revolutions in traditional financial history—confusing the technology itself with the speculative activities surrounding it. Historical experience shows that as long as an asset possesses tradability, price volatility, and narrative space, speculation is almost inevitable.The stock market is an example, as is real estate, and the tulip mania of the 17th century was no exception. The key is not whether speculation itself exists, but whether, after the speculative frenzy subsides, real, sustainable, and scalable infrastructure remains. The irrational pursuit of tulips can also trigger a bubble economy (Frans Hals Museum). From this perspective, the path represented by the figure offers another answer. Mike Cagney argues that the true value of blockchain lies not in creating new types of asset speculation, but in restructuring the most expensive, hidden, yet core cost structure in the financial system—credit costs. As he has emphasized in numerous interviews, blockchain is not intended to "disrupt finance," but rather to eliminate the friction caused by intermediaries simply because of inconsistent ledgers and unverifiable data, removing "credit" from the equation of negotiation and settlement. This also explains a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon: traditional financial institutions, which most need to use blockchain to reduce costs, are often the most resistant to it. The reason is simple: once peer-to-peer settlement and instant clearing become a reality, models that rely on process complexity to maintain profits will inevitably be weakened or even eliminated. Traditional financial institutions aren't unaware of the potential; rather, they understand that if this system truly works, most of the intermediary fees they charge today will become illegitimate. However, history repeatedly proves that the value creation brought about by efficiency improvements ultimately outweighs the cost of the transformation itself. Just as during the Industrial Revolution, the advent of the steam-powered spinning machine caused a temporary loss of income for many family spinners, resulting in social pain, but the overall increase in productivity propelled the accumulation of social wealth and improved living standards. The long-term value of efficiency improvements often far outweighs short-term pain. Figure's success is a true reflection of this logic: through blockchain technology, they achieved real-time settlement of large-scale credit assets and efficient capital turnover, effectively reducing systemic credit costs while establishing a sustainable and scalable financial infrastructure. The market has also given clear recognition: on September 11, 2025, Figure successfully listed on Nasdaq, with its stock price rising 24% on its first day. This not only reflects investors' trust in its business model and technological capabilities but also shows that the traditional financial world is gradually abandoning its prejudice against Web3 and beginning to acknowledge the practical value of blockchain in improving efficiency and reducing credit costs.