Bernstein analysts said Friday that Figure Technology Solutions’ first-quarter earnings report shows that fintech is quickly becoming a unique business among blockchain markets.
Figure’s May 11 earnings report handily beat Wall Street estimates for revenue and EBITDA, with the company looking to transform real-world credit assets into blockchain-native instruments that can be traded, financed and financed more efficiently.
As Figures builds a blockchain-native capital market ecosystem, analysts expect the company to surprise investors with how it differs from balance sheet-based fintech lending platforms, viewing FIGR shares as a real-time reflection of blockchain lending volumes.
“Live blockchain data from FIGR suggests a record second quarter ahead,” Bernstein analysts said in a note to clients on May 15. “As the market becomes more efficient at tracking live blockchain volume data, we believe the FIGR stock price should become a real-time reflection of blockchain lending volumes,” they said.
Figure tries to sell Wall Street and the DeFi world on the idea that it is not just a fast-growing home equity lender (HELOC) wrapped in a crypto brand, but a complete blockchain capital markets platform.
The Figure Technology ecosystem. Source: Bernstein
On the management results of May 12 callexecutive chairman and co-founder Mike Cagney said that after moving Figure’s digital assets to DeFi for funding about a year ago, he faced a challenge common to all real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain.
“DeFi is asset-based lending. The premise is that the collateral securing the loan is liquid. What are collateral as a whole? If LTV is violated, how can a lender take a fractional position on the entire loan? Even if they could, where would they sell it?” Cagney said the company’s Forge platform converts entire loans into small, single-dollar, liquid equity units.
Bernstein said he envisions Figure building a complete marketplace where real-world assets, both loans and possibly stocks, can serve as active collateral for borrowing and lending liquidity. “This moves more towards a model where FIGR simply takes a small fee from the entire blockchain economy within its ecosystem,” they said.
In the meantime, institutional investors remain skeptical of blockchain stories for finance, which CEO Michael Tannenbaum acknowledged on the call, arguing that Figure’s advantage is operational rather than ideological. He described AI as “the brain” and blockchain as “the nervous system,” saying blockchain’s native data structures facilitate the automation of loan underwriting, compliance and verification.
Related: The tokenized RWA market is growing 420% since 2025 thanks to regulatory clarity and access.
The tokenized credit market could rely on broadband
In previous research, Bernstein estimated an estimated $4 trillion addressable market value for the total annual volume of credit issuance across multiple loan categories that could potentially be moved on-chain as tokenized assets.
This includes loans such as mortgages, auto loans, home equity lines of credit and small business loans – segments where Figure is expanding beyond its core business.
Tokenized credit remains a small segment of the broader RWA market. Industry data shows that the sector is currently valued at approximately $5.14 billion, highlighting the gap between current adoption and the longer-term growth opportunity highlighted by Bernstein.
Overview of the current size and scope of the global tokenized credit market. Source: RWA.xyz
Other projects are already experimenting with the provision of on-chain credit. The centrifuge has expanded its decentralized finance platform to include tokenized credit and US Treasury products on new blockchain networks, aiming to connect institutional grade assets to DeFi liquidity.
The figure has shifted to areas such as auto loans via the Hastra DeFI protocolwhere tokenized credit products are designed to connect to decentralized finance and broader blockchain markets. Launched last year by the Provenance Blockchain Foundation, the protocol exchanges wrapped yields for a Prime token. Recently, Hastra announced the launch of the Morpho protocol on Ethereum, opening up an even larger addressable DeFi market.
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