Blockchain’s Fannie Mae Moment, Bitcoin Treasury Shakeout & AI Agents That Pay

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:00)
On today's Public Keys from the New York Stock Exchange, is blockchain the new Fannie Mae? Which digital asset treasury companies are built to last? And Coinbase is betting your next paying customer might not be human. I'm Jen Sanasie, let's get into it.
Happy Monday, everyone. It's been less than a year since Figure Technology Solutions went public, IPO'd at $25 a share on the NASDAQ last September, raised $787 million and already the company is posting numbers that are hard to ignore. Figure recently reported its best quarter ever, a 95% year-over-year adjustment net revenue growth, a 55% adjusted dividend margin and 132% growth in its consumer loan marketplace. The company is calling itself a rule of 150 business in a world where most Vintech investors are happy to see a rule of 40 Joining us now is Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure Technology Solutions. Hey, Michael.

**Michael Tannenbaum** (0:55)
Hey, thanks for having me.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:56)
Thanks for being here. All right. Big numbers to unpack there. Talk to me about the rule of 150 What's driving that?

**Michael Tannenbaum** (1:03)
Well, thank you for having me.
Just to set some clarity around that, a lot of folks focus on rule of 40, as you mentioned. For us, we're growing about 100% top line and 50% bottom line, and the addition, the sum of those numbers is 150 What it reflects is really rapid growth, but importantly, at high margin. Let me tell you how we do that, because we are a marketplace that focuses on mortgage, we're tokenized, so everything we do is on a blockchain. We have about 500 partners that use our technology to originate loans. When they do that, they save a ton of time and cost. We do a mortgage process in about five days versus industry average of 45, and in about $1,000 versus industry average of 12 So much faster, much cheaper, and as I mentioned, all on blockchain rails, and it's that capital light marketplace, we call it Figure Connect, that's been growing so rapidly, and what it means is as we grow rapidly, we also see margin expansion, and the combination of that gets you to that rule of 150 debt you mentioned.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (2:12)
I want to take a step back for a second. I was reading that when you first started talking about organized loans and securitizing them on chain, people were calling you crazy on Wall Street. Here we are at the New York Stock Exchange. We're talking about these really impressive numbers, not even a year after you IPO'd with Figure. Just talk to us about how that feels, and what you might go back and say to some of those folks who we're talking to.

**Michael Tannenbaum** (2:35)
Well, I think it absolutely reflects the moment that we're in, which is one where I think tokenization is absolutely the future of financial services. Probably a year, year and a half ago, if you went to a board meeting of a bank or financial institution, insurance company and said, what's our tokenization strategy? You'd be laughed out of the room. Whereas today, you absolutely better be coming to the board meeting, understanding where the institution is going from a tokenization perspective. So it really reflects this, I don't want to say inevitability, but this sense of the future and how the future is going to be one of a much more tokenized, efficient approach, and Figure has been at the forefront of that. It actually reminds me some ways of the distinction between crypto and blockchain. We very much focus on the latter, and I go back to, for example, cloud, which was a big trend in 2010
Before 2010, software was not hosted in the cloud, and cloud was a technology, but people focused on what the technology could do, and that's very much our approach to blockchain. So we really focus on how can blockchain provide standardization, lower costs, improve liquidity, and those are benefits everyone understands versus getting caught up in maybe a crypto narrative. And I think that transition very much reflects how here we are today on the New York Stock Exchange posting those kind of numbers that you referenced.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (4:05)
I want to talk about this line that you said. Blockchain is a standardization engine in capital markets. Standardization is what creates liquidity. You're drawing a direct comparison to what Fannie Mae did for the mortgage market. Just talk to us a little bit about that for folks who are just learning about Figure today. What are the parallels?

**Michael Tannenbaum** (4:22)
Fannie Mae is unique in that it's probably the only capital market that exists where the assets are abstracted from whoever originated those assets. As an example, a local community bank down the street could originate a loan and sell it to Fannie Mae as could JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the country. But on the investor end, they just see the Fannie Mae stamp of approval.