Figure wants to bring the mortgage market on-chain and Washington is paying attention

Go Figure.Getting a mortgage has traditionally meant navigating one of the slowest, most paper-heavy processes in American finance — a maze of documents, middlemen and repeated manual checks that can take months to complete.But Figure, a fintech firm based in New York that went public in September, is rerouting the entire system by moving it on-chain, making the process both faster and cheaper.Origination can happen in five days — instead of the typical 45 — and costs roughly $1,000 instead of the usual $12,000.“This is blockchain actually lowering costs and helping people,” CEO Michael Tannenbaum, 38, told NYNext.“This is the future of capital markets.”In Washington and on Wall Street, momentum is growing to move antiquated financial infrastructure on-chain, where ownership is transparent, standardized and instantly transferable.

Few companies are doing that work at scale, but Figure — which has originated nearly $18 billion in mortgages and other real-world assets since launch in 2018 — is one of them. Figure now accounts for roughly 75% of all loans being originated and recorded on the blockchain, a young but fast-growing segment of the market known as tokenization.More than 200 institutions — including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Sixth Street, Jefferies, Guaranteed Rate and CrossCountry Mortgage — now use Figure’s infrastructure to originate, register and trade loans; those products are rated Triple-A by both S&P and Moody’s.In the traditional mortgage system, every institution has its own forms, workflows and requirements.

Each time a loan is bought or sold, the process effectively starts from scratch.Figure eliminates the mishegoss by standardizing everything.Instead of bespoke paperwork, every loan is created with the same data and documentation.The company leverages AI to read complex trust and LLC documents, extract the relevant data and write it on-chain in a tamper-proof digital record.

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