Welcome to the Figure Technology Solutions special event conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two . To get to as many questions as time permits, we kindly ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. So others can hear your questions clearly, we ask that you pick up your handset for best sound quality. Lastly, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Craig Stream with Investor Relations.
Thank you, Chloe. Hi, everybody. Glad you're with us today. This is Craig Stream, Investor Relations at Figure. Joining me on today's call are Mike Cagney, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Figure; Michael Tannenbaum, our Chief Executive Officer; Macrina Kgil, our Chief Financial Officer; and Claire Hove, our Chief Operating Officer. Certain statements made during today's call may represent forward-looking statements, which may vary materially from actual results. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our Form S-1 registration statement and set forth on slide three of today's presentation, which we have posted in the IR section of our website. We are not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change, except as required by law. A recording of the conversation today will be made available on our website following the conclusion of today's call.
Following the conclusion of the prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions, and I encourage you to follow along in the posted presentation as we go through our remarks. I also want to point out that any listener may submit a question during the webcast using the link at the Events tab on our website where they have connected to the presentation. With that, I will turn the call over to Mike Cagney. Mike, please go ahead.
Thanks, Craig. Good afternoon, everyone. We're excited to share details on a landmark development: Figure's launch of the first-ever issue of a Blockchain-native public equity security. This offering builds on the success of our traditional IPO earlier this year and marks a fundamental advance in how public securities can be issued, traded, and financed. Our Blockchain-native equity allows investors to hold, transfer, and collateralize Figure stock directly on the Provenance Blockchain, with four key advantages: faster bilateral settlement, 24/7 trading, cross-collateralization of the security to other assets, and the ability to lend or borrow the stock transparently. It represents the true power of a decentralized approach to the equity capital markets, employing the best of blockchain technology to remove certain intermediaries and creating an infrastructure that's more efficient, transparent, and aligned with investor interests.
Before I continue, it's important to clarify that this will be a non-dilutive offering only to existing shareholders. In the transaction, certain existing shareholders who choose to participate will be selling their shares, and in turn, Figure will mint new blockchain stock, meaning that the total Figure share count will not be affected by the transaction. On slide five, you'll see the contrast between the traditional NMS equity infrastructure and the Blockchain-native equity approach we're planning on pioneering with this transaction. In the status quo national market security system, equities move through a complex stack of intermediaries, from custodians and clearing firms to prime brokers and introducing brokers. There's a large amount of reliance on third parties and a trust-based paradigm where each party extracts rents at the expense of the equity holders. Our Blockchain-native structure eliminates this complexity and reduces intermediary economics.
Trades occur directly between self-custody wallets and our alternative trading system, an ATS. Settlement occurs instantly, and counterparties maintain direct control of their assets throughout the process. We believe this model delivers material cost savings, better stock loan economics, increased borrow capability, and a significantly improved user experience. It is a new capital markets infrastructure, one that no longer relies on legacy systems like DTCC, the centralized exchanges, and the prime brokers. On slide six, you will see the benefits of Figure's approach outlined in more detail, in particular when juxtaposed against some recent efforts by other tokenization efforts in the marketplace today. The proposed transaction, which we expect is a blueprint for other issuers to offer or follow, is a Blockchain-native approach that has some very clear advantages.
In terms of equity as collateral, shares of Figure's Blockchain-native equity can be pledged, borrowed against, or lent within the decentralized finance protocol Democratized Prime on the Provenance Blockchain. In our Blockchain-native model, investors hold Figure shares directly in their own self-custody wallets. Those same shares can then be used immediately as collateral to borrow yield stablecoins, participate in liquidity pools, or support margin exposure, all on-chain within Provenance Blockchain ecosystem. In terms of U.S. retail availability, the reason we're able to offer this comes down to regulatory structure and registration. Our Blockchain-native equity will be a fully registered share class of common stock. We filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the SEC, meaning it's subject to the same investor protections, disclosure standards, and governance framework as our Nasdaq-listed shares.
24/7 trading is commonly mentioned as an advantage in tokenized markets, and while we do not view this to be significant, it has some advantages, and we're excited to offer it. Token self-custody is another example of removing third parties and enabling a truth-based ecosystem to replace a trust-based status quo. It allows investors to directly hold and control their shares without intermediaries, reducing counterparty risk, lowering costs, and enabling instant settlement on-chain. It also supports a direct, transparent stock loan marketplace where the prime broker locates services replaced by peer-to-peer borrow through DeFi, effectively a limit order book for stock borrow. Stablecoin settlement enables instant 24/7 clearing and reduces transaction and funding friction while also allowing on-chain liquidity to remain on-chain. Importantly, this equity security provides the same voting rights and economic terms as our existing Nasdaq-listed equity, including dividend participation.
Ensuring that the Blockchain-native stock is fully pari passu with our existing NMS shares is essential. Our goal is to deliver a structure that is strictly better than the current system, not innovation at the expense of investor rights. We built a model where investors can hold Figure stock in their wallets, earn yield through stock loan, borrow against their stock and other digital assets, and participate directly in governance, all on public blockchain. It's a structural leap beyond any product currently available in the market. Now I'm going to turn it over to Michael Tannenbaum, our CEO, to highlight on the next slide how this offering and approach ties into our broader Figure ecosystem.
Thanks, Mike. As shown on slide seven, this offering isn't just an innovation in capital markets. It's also deeply strategic for Figure. Our Blockchain-native equity becomes a pioneering building block for Democratized Prime, our DeFi platform on the Provenance Blockchain. As I have said before, we specifically named it Democratized Prime to reflect its disruptive nature with respect to prime brokerage. Just as we created a flywheel effect with our tokenized loans and real-world assets, by now adding equity to serve as collateral, we create a similar flywheel effect, driving liquidity, enabling another vertical, and encouraging market participants to embrace efficiency of true Blockchain-native behavior. This expansion integrates seamlessly into Figure's ecosystem, connecting our origination platform, alternative trading system, and yield stablecoin to create a comprehensive, self-reinforcing marketplace for real-world asset finance.
Furthermore, we hope other issuers adopt this model and also issue Blockchain-native share classes into our and the Provenance Blockchain's market infrastructure, through which we will earn volume-based fees on both the infrastructure itself and on the financing. These conversations we are having with future issuers today are primarily with companies that are Blockchain-native or adjacent, such as custodians, miners, digital asset treasuries, and exchanges, but we also expect this infrastructure to be appealing to a broader set of companies. Slide eight shows the flow of transactions through our alternative trading system, or ATS, which integrates into the Provenance Blockchain. First, through the ATS, shareholders can engage in bilateral, self-settling trades that eliminate counterparty and settlement risk. Unlike traditional markets that require clearing intermediaries, all trades settle directly between self-custody wallets in real time, 24/7.
Second, through Democratized Prime, those same shareholders can lend shares of blockchain stock or excess stablecoin liquidity back into the system, earning yield at a market-clearing rate. What's unique here is that liquidity, settlement, and collateralization are unified within a single blockchain environment powered by YLDS, our SEC-registered stablecoin. This is what we mean when we talk about bringing capital markets on-chain, not tokenizing existing securities for symbolic value, but actually enabling native issuance, trading, and financing. On slide nine, you can see what this experience looks like from an investor's perspective across a variety of personas and use cases. The blockchain equity will be fully tradable through Figure's platform across multiple interfaces, from mobile quick-buy screens for retail investors to professional trading tools with limit orders and portfolio-level margin management. Investors can log into Figure's marketplace directly or through integrated third-party wallets that have been KYC'd.
Beyond simple trading, the blockchain equity can also be used as collateral within Democratized Prime. That means holders can borrow against their equity, lend it out for yield, all on-chain, all governed by transparent, smart contracts, and earning enhanced economics versus the current intermediated status quo. As shown in the demo screens, investors can see real-time lending pools on the Provenance Blockchain with available supply, demand, and algorithmically determined APRs, creating a true market for equity financing without intermediaries. This is an entirely new level of functionality for a public equity, a programmable security that participates directly in a digital financial ecosystem, not just in a brokerage account. I will turn it back to Mike now to close us out before we open it up for questions.
Thanks, Michael. I want to take a step back and highlight the significance of this transaction. What we're doing isn't just issuing a new share of stock; we're actually creating an entirely new equity capital markets. There's no DTCC as a common registry, it's happening on public blockchain. There's no centralized exchange like the Nasdaq or the NYSE, it's trading on our alternative trading system, which is self-custody and self-settle, so effectively functions like a decentralized exchange. There's no prime broker, you're using DeFi. There's no need for an introducing broker, you can effectively attach with a KYC wallet to be able to trade. You're really disrupting the entire vertical stack, and we believe this is massively disruptive. When we started Figure back in 2018, our goal is to use blockchain to transform how capital markets work.
We've certainly done that in the credit space, over $20 billion of loan origination on blockchain at this point and growing rapidly. This is our opportunity to do that in the equity space, and we ultimately see this extensible into every asset, whether it's commodities or currencies or crypto. We are excited to be at the forefront of this and excited to be driving this transaction. With that, we'll open it up for questions.
Floor is now open for questions. At this time, if you have a question or comment, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question is answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Again, we kindly ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up, and please pick up your handset when posing your questions. Thank you. Our first question is coming from James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Line is open.
Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. I'd just like to take a big-picture lens here on what this means for the equity market. We'll now have the, as you describe it, the DTC-driven equity market and now your equity market. Maybe you just talk about fragmentation of the equity market as you see it or not, and how do you drive liquidity towards the Provenance Blockchain?
Sure. Michael, you want me to start?
Yes, I do.
Great. One of the things that we did when we were out on the IPO roadshow is we talked to what must have been something like 150 buy-side accounts, and what we said uniformly to all of them is they want to own the blockchain version of the equity. They want to own it because of the ability to cross-collateralize it. This extends the ability to borrow beyond traditional prime brokerage, and they want to own it because of the ability to control stock loan, where today the prime broker, through the opaque locate process, as securities go special, tends to take that economic out. Universally, everyone was like, "This is great. We'd love to own the blockchain security. How do you ensure liquidity?
How do you ensure it ties into the Nasdaq security? What we've done and what we've identified and articulated in the S-1 is a mechanism in which we can swap the blockchain security for the NMS security and vice versa, the NMS security for the blockchain security. What that does is on day one, it brings whatever liquidity exists in the Nasdaq into the blockchain side of the equation. We expect that liquidity will be consistent across both platforms. If anything, liquidity will be enhanced because of the ability to move across both platforms. What we would hope is over time, companies will move from a dual-listing construct to just listing on blockchain.
We'd expect, even in the circumstance where there is a dual-listing, that we could reduce that tether, eliminate it entirely, and that the blockchain security would actually trade at a premium to the NMS security because it has greater utility value. We are very focused day one to ensure that there is not a sacrifice of utility or of liquidity in trading on the blockchain, but over time, we actually believe this will be the preferred route because of the higher utility value of the security itself.
Mike, one thing I think is probably helpful for the call—
Sorry, James, if I cut you off—I do think it's helpful to acknowledge not only the interest that we have from other issuers, but also the interest we have from a broad number of market participants, including asset managers and broker-dealers who see this opportunity as well. It is definitely something that, to the way that you opened the question, it is a new paradigm and a new ecosystem and one that is going to bring not only other issuers into this blockchain-based approach, but also those asset managers and broker-dealers that are excited about it as well.
Excellent. That's super helpful. Just a quick—sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to say, just to reinforce, this isn't a construct where we believe these two systems coexist over the long term. This is a direct competitive attack to the current equity stack.
Okay. Thank you so much. Maybe you could just talk about interoperability across blockchains. Obviously, this is on the Provenance Blockchain, but you could also build tokens on other blockchains. How do you facilitate that interoperability across blockchains using the same mechanism that you have between the existing equity market and Provenance Blockchain or some other mechanism?
You can take that one.
Sure. I can—yeah, I'll start on that. We do this today with YLDS. With YLDS, we have an SEC-registered public fixed-income security that's effectively a yielding stablecoin. We recently announced that while YLDS was initially minted exclusively on Provenance Blockchain, we now mint it on SWI. We're now minting it on—or planning on minting it on Solana. We'll be minting it on Stellar and other networks as well. The security has a unique construct because you have a transfer agent, and the transfer agent can effectively burn token on one L1 network and mint on another L1 network without the need for a bridge. Rather than having to use Wormhole or IBC to effectively port the token over from level one network to level one network, the transfer agent can simply burn on one and mint on the other.
It provides effectively a real-time, very low-cost, other than gas fees to the network, mechanism to move the security across chains, and we think this provides a foundation for ultimately extensible application into broader DeFi products.
Thanks a lot, and congrats on the offering.
Thank you.
We'll take our next question from Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research. Line is open.
Hey, guys. Looking through the slides and hearing your comments, a lot of incentives for the investors here: 24/7 trading, ability to lend, etc., etc. Could you unpack in a little more detail the incentive for a corporate or maybe an issuer to list their stock through this venue, just exactly what the benefits they would get versus the traditional process might be?
I can start with just the opportunity to access retail, and then, Mike, I think you should build off that. When you're going through an issuance process, and we've seen this increasingly, there's a lot of benefit in kind of the way the equity markets are moving. People want to engage more with individual investors, and I think that from the issuer's perspective, especially folks that are blockchain-adjacent, but also people that aren't, there is this opportunity to use a listing to kind of market your company. There is a lot of excitement and interest in this approach, and it is very much aligned with the way the equity markets are moving in that regard. It is something that we experienced while we didn't do a Blockchain-native issuance for our first offering, although we wanted to, but it's a matter of timing and getting the attention.
We see that as a really big motivating factor for folks. I know, Mike, that's something that's very important to you, so I'll let you elaborate.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of dynamics. I'd say three key points here. One is the blockchain nature of the security allows for a much broader access in terms of folks that might have difficulty with a traditional U.S. brokerage account being able to come on the chain, transact, and so that's going to drive up demand for the security. You also have the benefits we talked about earlier in the security intrinsic to it, the cross-collateralization capability and the stock loan capability that, once untethered to the NMS security, we would expect the security to trade at a premium. As an issuer, you would much rather issue the higher-yielding security than the lower-yielding security in terms of just net proceeds and economics. I also think that you don't want to discount the buy-side's ability to push this.
If you look at Larry Fink, for example, he talks repeatedly about the tokenization of everything. If BlackRock really wants the tokenization of everything, this is a great way to start. BlackRock goes to all its portfolio companies it holds and says, "Get your stock on blockchain." We expect the buy-side is going to play an important role here in driving this because of how much utility it accrues back to the investors.
Okay. Interesting. And then just on something you said there, Mike, could you compare and contrast the KYC, AML, general startup processes for investors on Figure ATS versus more traditional brokerages or channels?
Yeah. You're going to have the same KYC to trade on Figure's ATS because it's administered by Figure broker-dealer, Figure Securities, and as a broker-dealer, it has the same standard KYC requirements. I think that what becomes interesting, and certainly is a discussion path with both the Clarity Act, the Ag Committee Act, and the SEC, is the extensibility of taking securities onto DeFi protocols and whether or not such actions require KYC when the mover is not a registered entity. A lot of people confuse the KYC requirement for the instrument, and being a security doesn't imply KYC. What implies KYC is being a regulated entity moving that security. I think there's a lot of potential downstream applications in DeFi that should be clarified, no pun intended, with the Clarity Act as we get legislation guidance in terms of how blockchain assets are traded and financed.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your telephone keypad. We'll move next to Ryan Tomasello with KBW. The line is open.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. If you could just elaborate generally on the efforts you do have underway to educate other issuers and really sell them on these new capital markets rails if there's a formal sales effort underway. On the economics, if you can put a finer point just on how we should think about what that could look like to Figure to the extent other issuers do follow suit over time if it's reliable to compare just to traditional broker-dealer economics and how we should be thinking about sizing this opportunity. Thanks.
Yeah. I'll start on the first part, and then I think Macrina is good to cover the economics portion. I think as we outlined in the prepared remarks, Figure has a history of building out marketplaces. We were the first to put consumer loans on blockchain. We were the first to securitize blockchain loans as examples. We see this current transaction as very much a reference for what can be. We have had a bunch of dialogue with other issuers, but this is going to be operationally, and one of the reasons why we have Claire, our COO, on the call is to acknowledge the large amount of effort that we are undertaking to build this marketplace out. While we do have lots of conversations and we expect this to be a reference point, and those conversations are accelerating, it will be some time.
For example, when we report earnings next quarter, we do not necessarily expect that we are going to have material contribution from this, but this is a reference that we are building. It is a primitive for how the equity capital markets ultimately will work. You should expect that those issuer conversations that we are having today will translate into economic activity later into 2026.
Really, just to add to that in terms of economics, I would say the most important view that we have is this can be used as collateral as part of our overall Democratized Prime ecosystem. As a reminder, that is about 50 basis points of the balance that is on the overall Democratized Prime marketplace. That is one key part. In the future, we can also think through how we can be charging folks for onboarding onto our overall ATS, but that will be a very nominal fee is how we are thinking about it. Lastly, as the market becomes more active and there are more equity tokens on our exchange, and we also have a lot more market makers, we can think about how we charge for the market makers as well.
Great. Then post this offering, you'll have equities in addition to consumer credit. I guess from here, how would you rank order where you're most optimistic about expanding into new verticals? I mean, you've alluded to FX, commodities, but in general, how you're thinking about the opportunity set from here post equities. Thanks.
I'll start by saying that in the debt and equity space, those are both enormous markets. If you look at consumer credit and that really being extensible into other forms of credit and now equity, I think the primitives that we've established are those that can expand into trillions of dollars of market activity and valuation. We do see a lot of opportunity in these markets. However, I know, Mike, we've talked as a company, and you've talked as well about kind of the broader capital market, and we do see ultimately that this is going to be the future of how all capital markets work, not limited to just those asset classes. I'll let you elaborate.
Yeah. I mean, I think you hit the key point, which is these two markets are enormous, and we continue to build into credit. We continue to build into first-line mortgage, for example, which is the largest private credit capital market in existence, largest credit marketplace behind U.S. Treasuries. The opportunity to build into equity where it's not just new issuance, it's the ability to convert existing equity, NMS-listed equity onto blockchain introduces a significant opportunity and one that we'll lean in on. While we're optimistic about the extension of this across all asset classes, I think these two are big ones and ones that we'll be very focused on certainly over the next year, next 12 months to continue to expand our vertical on the credit side and really build a real competitive position on the public equity side.
Great. Thank you.
We have one question from the web. This new capital market system is taking on Wall Street in virtually every way: investment banks, trading desks, prime brokerage, etc. What sort of response are you anticipating from the street?
Mike, there's nothing I can say that will be as eloquent as you will on this topic.
I appreciate you handing that off to me. Look, I think that there's two camps in terms of how this impacts the street. I think that the sell-side firms should recognize an enormous opportunity here. Certainly, they're losing some economic in the capacity of stock locate, for example, and what they do on stock loan. That is more than offset, I believe, by the ability to cross-collateralize assets and significantly extend what they can lend credit against and eliminate the need of single-name credit where they're doing asset-based lending as opposed to underwriting the borrower. Imagine a blockchain construct where rather than Goldman is my prime broker, Goldman just lends $0.80 on the dollar to Figure stock and come one, come all. I think that introduces significant opportunity, and I think that the sell-side is going to lean in.
I certainly think the buy-side is a huge beneficiary of this. I do not see them pushing back on it. The ones who push back on this will be the intermediaries. As we have talked about in the origin of Figure, the intermediaries exist because we do not have truth in markets. We have the need for trust, and we cannot trust anyone. We have registries, and we have seven parties that sit in between a buyer and seller in a stock transaction, and we have collateral agents and custodians and all these things that really go away in a true bilateral blockchain-based world.
Certainly, they're going to fight, but I think the benefit is that if this was a wholesale replacement of everyone, if we were trying to get rid of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Cantor and others as part of this transaction, yeah, there'd be one heck of a fight. They're benefiting from the disintermediation we're doing. I think as such, they should be very aligned with this change so that when the intermediary incumbents fight against this, they're not just fighting Figure, they're fighting the broader street. That is why we have a lot of confidence in our ability to not just execute into here, but to drive real adoption.
For our next question, when you have shares trading on your ATS and Nasdaq, how should we think about the potential of inconsistent share prices between these two venues?
I think that's a good one for Claire.
Thanks, Michael. As Mike alluded to earlier, we believe there is reason that the blockchain shares, given the ability for cross-collateralization and stock loan, to trade at a premium to the NMS. Aside from that potential premium, we believe the shares will likely trade largely in line. Mechanically, we will support that by having market makers on the platform, and we also support the ability to convert from blockchain shares to NMS and NMS to blockchain to support a minimal price discrepancy between the two share classes.
For our next question, how do you plan to attract and retain market makers and institutional participants for the Blockchain-native equity? Can you walk us through the conversion process between tokenized shares and Class A shares, and are there any operational or regulatory constraints?
Claire, why don't you start with that one and we can add?
Sure. I'll take the second half of that question first. The mechanics of conversion for tokenized to NMS is traders of the blockchain shares on our platform will be able to submit a request to convert the shares, at which point the blockchain shares will be encumbered, and our FinOps team, our financial operations team, will work to send the shares to either a named TA or to a broker-dealer with a box at DTC to transmit from blockchain to NMS. Once that NMS transfer has occurred, the blockchain shares will be burned to ensure that it is non-dilutive. Going the inverse from NMS to blockchain shares, individuals will be able to request from their broker-dealer or, again, from their TA to send shares, NMS shares to a Figure's treasury account, at which point in time we will mint blockchain shares into our ecosystem.
We will also have the ability to support that process. When someone wants to convert from NMS to blockchain, they will alert our ecosystem as well so that we can ensure a one-for-one match between NMS and blockchain shares. Jay, could you remind me the big—sorry, go ahead.
No, I was going to say the beginning of the question was how do we attract institutional participants and therefore retain market makers, or at least I'm drawing that relationship, which is I think institutional participants in particular are going to be attracted by the ability to control stock loan, for example, and also by the enhanced liquidity they'll get from cross-collateralization. Both of those concepts are applicable to retail and institutional, but as was mentioned in the prepared remarks and in some of this Q&A, we have seen a lot of interest from institutional participants in being able to control the equity and not necessarily be intermediated by the prime broker and have more control of both those economics and also the collateral. That activity will then naturally attract market makers.
I'll let you add anything else, Claire or Mike, to that point before we move on.
I think certainly the market makers are going to arbitrage any difference across the NMS security and the blockchain security. So there's certainly a profit incentive for them to lean in early on as part of this.
For our next question, if you own the blockchain security, how does your vote get logged? What system are you using? Are the votes logged on-chain and visible publicly?
Yes, those votes will be visibly, publicly, and logged on-chain. I think that we've spent a lot of time talking about prime brokers as intermediaries, but equally relevant and where you do see a lot of constraints in the status quo equity market is around the voting and the proxy process and the confusion that that can entail. You even see some litigation around the control that the proxy firms yield. We do think this is a way in which we're going to add value for equity holders and restore more control over that process.
This is also to remind the audience one of the ways in which we believe that our approach is better than other tokenized equity options because the stock, the security is pari passu with the traditional equity in that you do have both the voting rights as we are talking about today as well as the dividend rights.
We'll take a question from Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research. The line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the extra question. Just sort of related to what you were just talking about, Mike T. Is Figure acting as the transfer agent and providing the proxy service for the blockchain shares? Or maybe to ask the question directly, are there any differences between who is the transfer agent and the proxy service provider under the blockchain shares compared to the current structure?
Yes, we are doing that. Claire, feel free to elaborate if you want, but we do have our own transfer agent, Figure Equity Solutions.
Yes, that's right. Figure Equity Solutions is our TA for the digitally native securities and can support all the standard TA functions.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Our next web question. If we lend using Figure stock through Democratized Prime, is there any scenario we would lose the Figure stock as collateral?
No, there is no scenario where you would lose the Figure stock as collateral. I think that we do support a cross-collateralization, which is one of the powerful value propositions of Democratized Prime because historically you do not have cross-asset and often not even cross-equity collateralization and margin. That is something that blockchain in particular enables because of that lean perfection, which, kind of going back to last week's call, is one of the main aspects, is one of the main value propositions of blockchain and why we use it, and that underpins the Democratized Prime ecosystem.
Yeah, just to add to that, any stock loan is going to be collateralized by YLDS or by other assets, and it would be consistent in how we risk manage across all Democratized Prime lending pools where we have not incurred any losses nor do we expect to take any credit losses as it relates to that. You would have the same type of protection that you would have in any Democratized Prime pool.
Our next web question. When do you expect this offering to go live?
Claire, I think you are closest to the timing.
I think we are working through all the operational and logistics aspects of this, and as soon as the market's open, we will move forward likely in the new year with this offering.
Just to add to what Claire mentioned, this is a public document that has been filed with the SEC yesterday. We do need to wait for the SEC to go through its process. The key part is, though, we recently just completed an IPO in September, so we will be actively working with the SEC to move this forward as fast as we can.
For our next web question, for governance, how do you handle proxy fights, activism for an equity on-chain?
I think that just given the rights are going to be consistent across both, we will, at least for now, as we are operating both ecosystems, the votes will be collected from the blockchain equity that we have as well as through the traditional process and then be aggregated accordingly.
For our next web question, to the extent the ATS takes share from the market or from the exchanges, would not Figure be able to earn market data fees from the trading? Would the buy side be interested in this? Oh, Macrina, do you want to take this?
Figure should be able—oh, sorry, I was on mute. Figure should be able to earn the market data fees from the trading side and be able to share with that. It is an infrastructure that we would build as more of a phase two after we add on different types of equity onto our platform, but it is in our future in 2026 or 2027.
Our next web question is, is Figure a qualified custodian that will satisfy the custody rule for registered investment advisors who have private funds that would like to participate in this proposed offering?
That may be a question we need to come back on. I don't know, Claire, if you know that one. If not, we can follow up directly with the question about that.
Yeah, I think we are, but.
We're working with qualified custodians in partnership to ensure that RIAs and REX are able to support this offering.
For our last question, are you planning to also bring private shares to the chain and not only public shares? Would regulators approve the approach?
Mike, I'll let you comment on that as you've focused a lot on the uniqueness of our offering here.
Sure. I mean, look, a lot of early Figure investors remember that we actually have run secondary transactions for Figure equity on the ATS, on blockchain, but when the stock was private. Still, when it was a Reg D security and a Reg D restricted legend on it. Our view was that this had extensibility into the broader private equity or private company stock ecosystem. The challenge that we find there is that that stock tends to trade much less frequently. It's hard to get market maker support. We're not sure how valuable the extensibility is into private shares. Certainly, some of the largest companies like a Stripe, for example, there's going to be interest in potentially the ability to have markets there. Still, I doubt you're going to get consistent market making from it because of lack of borrow and other limitations.
We certainly have the ability to extend this out into private company stock, and we have done it already. There isn't any regulatory approval we need to be able to lean in and use the ATS for that purpose. I'm just not sure how large that market is. I know a lot of our peers talk about it and reference it as a huge opportunity, but I'm not sure running a limit order book for private company stock is actually that valuable.
Thanks, Mike. Thanks, everyone, for both the questions on today's call live as well as the ones submitted over the web. As you see from today's call, it is a very ambitious undertaking. It is something that goes back to one of the slides we talked about last week in terms of this has been something we've talked about with a lot of the investment community and in our prepared remarks and materials. It is something that is hard to do. It is hard to do new things, but there is valor and economics in doing so.
We're really excited about the ability to introduce a new asset class into our ecosystem and also to continue to lead the market forward in terms of how the capital markets can be and to restore the economics ultimately to the asset holders, whether they be equity or loan, and fulfill that promise of blockchain that disrupts not only incumbents, but the intermediation that we've so often talked about. It is a really big opportunity. We're really grateful to the team internally that's building this out and grateful for all of you for your interest and enthusiasm. We look forward to more.
Thank you. This concludes today's Figure Technology Solutions special event conference call. Please disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day.