Bringing every market onchain

Episode 24 of Season 6 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro and Figure Markets Co-Founder and CEO Mike Cagney.

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This episode of The Scoop, The Block's podcast, features Frank Chaparro in conversation with Mike Cagney, co-founder and CEO of Figure Technologies and its trading arm Figure Markets, on his ambitious vision for moving essentially every financial market onchain.

Outline

00:00 Intro
07:21 The 'Everything' Platform
12:16 Onchain Equities Trading
17:50 Institutionalization of Crypto
27:12 DeFi Lending
29:59 Rebuilding Crypto's Credit Markets
33:51 Wall Street Appetite for ATS
36:28 Regulatory Considerations
38:09 Closing Thoughts

Cagney, who previously co-founded and ran the fintech lender SoFi before launching Figure to build blockchain-based lending and marketplace infrastructure, lays out an everything-platform approach in which equities, credit, and other asset classes could eventually trade and settle on a blockchain without relying on the traditional web of brokers, clearinghouses, and lenders that intermediate those markets today. He explains how Figure has already used blockchain rails to originate and securitize a substantial volume of home equity lines of credit, arguing that the efficiency gains from removing manual, paper-based processes in lending translate directly into lower costs and faster settlement for both borrowers and institutional buyers of that credit.

The conversation turns to how traditional finance and Wall Street firms are increasingly exploring alternative trading systems and tokenized securities as a way to test blockchain rails within existing regulatory structures, and Cagney discusses the practical and regulatory hurdles still standing between today's market plumbing and his vision of full onchain equity trading. He also touches on the broader institutionalization of crypto, describing how larger financial players are moving from experimentation toward building real production infrastructure on public and permissioned blockchains alike, and how decentralized finance lending mechanisms could eventually be adapted to serve the kind of large-scale credit markets that currently run through banks and broker-dealers.

Throughout the discussion, Cagney draws on his experience building both a major consumer fintech and a blockchain-native credit business to argue that the technology's real opportunity lies not in speculative trading but in rebuilding the unglamorous back-office infrastructure of capital markets, a theme that has become increasingly central to institutional conversations about crypto's next phase, and one that runs through much of The Block's coverage of onchain finance more broadly.