Mike Cagney 🇺🇸

@api_based_hype @Figure You run the risk of liquidation any tiime you loop. But you don't need to loop. You can get high single digit yield on demo prime unlevered right now.

@mcagney @Figure Any chance ima get liquidated on looped rwas? Whats the reason why I should park it into looped rwas vs another lending protocol

Re: the RWA / looping narrative - people are missing the forest through the trees - RWA won't work as collateral unless it's liquid, and to be liquid it needs to be homogenous participation to the assets, not the assets themselves. @Figure Forge makes this possible. If you are originating loans and want to aceess DeFi using Figure Forge / build your blockchain strategy, DM me.

@HettyGreen2020 Common loans (e.g., HELOCs, or Auto, etc.) are pooled and priced at market, similar to what is done when they are aggregated for a securitization. re: 99% - point taken - working on it every day.

@mcagney So all loans regardless of fico are being dumped into a soup represented by the same token? Or do different tranches (by credit quality) have different tokens? Sidenote: DeFi language is still Greek to 99%

@CryptoStar2000 @ConsensusGurus FIGR prediction markets are for OPEN equities - not competing with the current market. FIGR does best when it goes into greenfield markets - not when it's a follower.

@mcagney @ConsensusGurus Hopefully A) $sofi not = $figr market cap at 5bil each B) $figr cancels prediction market plans. Its nonsense and that part of so call crypto will be done and over before you can say “Kalshi”

$FIGR falling unfairly here (IMO) - and an interesting prediction...

@HettyGreen2020 @muddywatersre I haven't run SoFi for 8.5 years now, so I wouldn't be in a position to opine.

@muddywatersre @mcagney any thoughts here

MW is short $SOFI. We believe SOFI is a financial engineering treadmill—not a healthy origination business. GE Capital-style marks, Enron-esque off-balance-sheet structures, and relentless dilution. muddywatersresearch.com/research/2026/…

@thoughts867 I haven't run SoFi for 8.5 years now, so I wouldn't be in a position to opine.

@mcagney What do you say to this?

@rule_of_law_guy I don't think they need it for trading. However, I do expect allocators to use a FIGR smart contract to maximize yield by allocating across the various democratized prime markets. Stay tuned...

@mcagney curious what you think of agentic "M2M' transacting. could FIGR have origination partners use agents to interact with Connect etc to streamline origination/trading?: tzero.com/news/tzero-lau… . .

@peter_ackerson @kavancane @figr Maybe 2X more. But I really don't want to stop helping @MBTannenbaum build @Figure until it's bigger than ICE. Then maybe I'll take a break.

@kavancane Years ago I was asked by a fellow VC when I thought @mcagney would be finished building $FIGR? I haven't spoken to him in a long time (except here) but I said then -- and still believe now -- that it won't happen until @FIGR is worth more than Sofi...

Great take on $FIGR. One of the best bets for institutional blockchain adoption 🚀

Licensing pre-emption is powerful, which is why we applied for an OCC charter without deposit insurance. The banking lobby threatened to sue the OCC if they granted that charter, and the OCC "kindly" asked us to put it back in. We didn't want deposits/FDIC insurance for a whole host of reasons, so we pulled the application (among other reasons, like not being able to use blockchain...). So I get the licensing motivation, and understand the value in deposits given the amount of lending you are doing. You and your team know better than anyone what will drive the most value for your business. In our situation, we just felt it was too much of a constraint on our business.

@mcagney @ManufortiCanada @paulxgu the charter is more about reliable, scalable nation-wide origination rather than funding. Replacing warehouse funding with brokered deposits is a secondary benefit as we’re not primarily a NIM focused company.

$UPST @davegirouard @paulxgu - You guys have been taking a lot of heat over your share price lately. Here are a few ideas that might help take some of the heat off… 1) Have several great quarters in a row. 2) Clear 300 million off your balance sheet. 4) Guide for 35% CAGR annually for the next 3 years. 5) Announce a new line of credit product. 6) Get the CTO to buy some shares. 7) Do an UPST share buyback. 8)Transition your Theil fellow ETO to CEO. 9) Get a bank charter to reduce regulatory fees and stabilize funding supply If none of this works, maybe you could talk some sense into Trump, negotiate peace in the Middle East, and reopen the straight of Hormuz?

@Macroswithomar You appear to have not read the S1. YLDS is in FCC as it is bankrupt remote to figure. It is backed by the same thing Genius coins are backed by. I generally don’t respond to new twitter accounts set up to drive FUD on Figure, but your post was so wrong I felt I had to.

$FIGR YLDS play: ~4% stable coin they say is backed by treasuries (maybe it is now), but the company itself is mostly backed by real estate loans, which are more risky than treasuries. Too much promise of “stability” risks YLDS collapsing. They already put it into a separate entity (Figure Certificate Company), so they’re segmenting the risk. IMO an unstable token at a higher yield would be more transparent to the risk and value of the loans. Could hurt FIGR’s reputation if FCC collapses, but FIGR shareholders should be insulated. Honestly a good way to get risk off FIGR’s sheet. @mcagney thoughts?

@Kevin702 @rule_of_law_guy @pulte For small balance (sub 300K) loans, you should look at @figure for a first lien HELOC. Let me know if you want me to connect you to our team.

@mcagney @rule_of_law_guy @pulte I am a Realtor in Las Vegas & these antiquated processes are literally just the tip of the iceberg. My clients already have trouble obtaining financing & stomaching the upfront and residual cost of a mortgage. Everything from FHA funding fee, PMI, loan/title, eventual refi, etc

Trump 47 Housing Finance Executive Order: Promote Digital Mortgage Standards. FHFA Director Pulte: I'm On It., by @RuleofLawGuy1 open.substack.com/pub/ruleoflawg… $fnma $fmcc

@rule_of_law_guy @pulte We hope to engage here.

@mcagney got it. except @pulte has to prepare report in 120 days "on the efficiency of national housing finance markets" per Section 4C of EO. Figure should get a meeting with him to lay out some context of what could be (IMO).

@sjdedic Governance, on its own, doesn't convey value. Governance that allows token holders to direct economics back to themselves can, however. x.com/mcagney/status…

One of the most misguided concepts crypto ever came up with might be governance tokens. Most companies don’t actually take governance seriously. They use it as regulatory arbitrage. The token exists because it’s essentially free money they can print on top of their equity. They would never hand over real decision-making power for their business to a random community (you). And even when it looks like they do, the vote is usually tilted through insider allocations so the outcome ends up exactly where it was planned from the start. That said, I do feel for the few teams that genuinely tried to make governance work. Ironically, those are often the same teams that truly cared about their token and tried to create real value accrual for it. But in practice, too many cooks spoil the broth. Running a business by democracy is one of the most inefficient structures imaginable. Endless proposal discussions, waiting for alignment, debating every step before anything can move forward. Meanwhile, you end up with a large number of “stakeholders” who aren’t actually interested in the long-term success of the business, but only in extracting short-term value from their position. It starts to resemble German politics: throw ten different groups with completely opposing views into the same room and the end result is that nothing happens at all. Crypto is still a startup industry driven by innovation. That means moving fast, trying things, breaking them, learning, iterating. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But you learn and adapt. Nothing kills innovation faster than decision paralysis. The recent drama around @aave is a great example of this tension. In my opinion, @StaniKulechov and his team are among the best builders in DeFi and genuinely try to make things work for everyone involved. But when everyone thinks they should have a say (each with different incentives) progress inevitably slows down. I don’t even want to imagine where Aave as a business might already be today if the DAO hadn’t become such a bottleneck. An even clearer example might be @AcrossProtocol and @hal2001’s recent proposal to take the company private again, precisely to avoid these governance gridlocks, while instead making participants true equity stakeholders and aligning everyone around a shared long-term goal. Hearing rumors that apparently even more DAOs are considering this step for quite some time already, so wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of these. Governance was one of those ideas that was well-intentioned but poorly implemented. In theory, it sounds beautiful, a decentralized kumbaya world where everyone has a voice. In practice, it simply doesn’t work. The only real path forward for tokens is digital equity onchain, in whatever form that ultimately takes. Stop trying to design structures that artificially separate ownership, control and value. Investors and communities have become far too sophisticated to keep falling for that. Founders who understand this today will be part of the great comeback of this industry tomorrow. But those who still think they can extract value the old way and work around these issues will simply be left behind. Welcome to the new era.

@rule_of_law_guy Yes - but the GSEs are no where near to leaning in on blockchain.

ICE would be smart to blockchain transition MERS in anticipation of this. didn't realize MERS-->ICE. seems to me that if GSEs insisted on blockchain lien registration (and no monopoly of registrar), then blockchain can be implemented along the path from mortgage to MBS, right? good starting point of tech reform for FHFA?

@rule_of_law_guy MERS is a chokepoint for mortgages to be on blockchain, but also for broader innovation in the space.

@mcagney asked another way, MERS is a chokepoint preventing DeFi of secondary mortgage finance market?

MERS is passive. You have to update it when the loan changes hands. And it requires the mortgage originators to audit the status of loans yearly, which is a huge cost. DART listens to the blockchain. It knows real time who owns the loan. It provides a UCC perfection to the loan. And there is no ongoing audit expense. DART has lots of applications beyond mortgage - music rights, patents, etc. - we're starting to lean in on other use cases.

@mcagney Mike, how does MERS' eNote program compare to DART tokenization? ir.theice.com/press/news-det…

@ConsensusGurus The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And that describes the federal student loan program.. until schools have skin in the game, this will continue.

How broken is higher education when hundreds of low quality private colleges cost as much or more to attend as the most elite schools. Harvard tuition is in the range of ~$55k, while small schools you’ve never heard of put folks into $500k of debt at a higher price tag:

@Figure’s DART is a better alternative, and used extensively by major players like Goldman and Jefferies in the Figure ecosystem. DART is a faster, cheaper, blockchain native alternative. @pulte - give originators a choice - let them save money that ultimately benefits borrowers through lower mortgage rates.

Starting point would be to eliminate the requirement that all GSE mortgages use MERS as a registry. MERS is owned by ICE, giving a private company a monopoly on GSE loan registration. It is also expensive (especially for the mortgage companies to audit annually), slow/error prone and not digital. It is crazy the GSEs haven’t opened up registry to competition.