The Truth About Crypto Lending with Tokenized Assets REVEALED! | Reid Simon Figure

Reid Simon (0:00)

Our bread and butter is collateralized lending. Consumer unsecured is just not something that we sort of are particularly interested. That's not to foreclose on the possibility of it, but we like physical things in the real world with real recourse, debasement of currency, and printing, and the user experience of self-custody. So long as those three elements stay intact, I think the price goes up and to the right.

Tony Edward (0:30)

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Link will be in the description. Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm Tony Edward.

Amanda Wickroft (1:17)

And I'm Amanda Wickroft.

Tony Edward (1:19)

And joining us is Reid Simon, who's the president of Digital Assets at Figur, which is a publicly traded company, best known for tokenizing helox. Reid, great to have you back on.

Reid Simon (1:30)

Absolutely. Great to see you again. Thanks for having me.

Tony Edward (1:33)

So Reid, last time we spoke, you were at Securitize. Tell us about your new role and what you're doing at Figur.

Reid Simon (1:39)

Yeah, so I've been in this space for, I think, going on 11 years now. So started in the wild, wild west of the beginning of crypto lending at blockchain.com, and then spent the last two years at Securitize. Then I've been at Figur for about a year now.

So I oversee all of our strategy and the business side of, once those helox and other credit assets get tokenized and exist on chain, how do we avail them into DeFi markets and build the business as it relates to a purely on-chain world?

Amanda Wickroft (2:18)

So you're about six months in now?

Reid Simon (2:21)

No, just about a year.

Amanda Wickroft (2:23)

Yeah. You are just about a year.

So you're in public company. What surprised you that you didn't see coming?

Reid Simon (2:31)

I think before I joined, I didn't really understand what role Figur played in the tokenization or sort of like crypto-adjacent markets. I think it was, at least in my understanding, sort of like using crypto technology to originate loans cheaper. I didn't really understand until I got here, sort of all of the other plans that were underway.

So I think we've been really excited to capitalize on that and have some exciting successes under our belt and plenty that we're continuing to build on.

Tony Edward (3:08)

Give us an overview of FIGUR and what do you guys do and the different services and solutions you offer?

Reid Simon (3:15)

Yeah. So as I alluded to, the company started in about 2018 Our founder, Mike Cagney, was founder of SoFi.

So SoFi really direct a consumer lending in the US. His vision was, if we use blockchain and associated technologies, not only can we optimize that business, but really we can, with that, reinvent traditional markets on-chain in a fulsome capacity.

So when we started the business, it was we were the lender. So we built the credit box. We use our balance sheet to originate those loans. Fast forward to today, I like to describe it as capital markets as a service. So our platform encompasses all of the corollary properties that would exist in TradFi for credit origination. So that's the underwriting capabilities.

That's the whole loan trading, the perfection, warehouse finance, and ultimately taking that into securitization. And so all of the requisite licensing, but it's all built on-chain. And it seemingly allows both TradFi investors to interact with those loan assets, but also we have the capability of distributing them and making them composable in DeFi. And so if you think about the business today, we do, I think, about a billion, almost two billion a month. And after this Kyavi acquisition, well north of about two billion a month of loan originations. And I think we make up maybe about 5% of that origination, and that's mostly in new loan types out. We try to incubate, but really we work with now almost 500 partners that plug in to our systems and use that whole tech stack to run their business.

Amanda Wickroft (5:09)