Building a Better Exchange - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

so I'm excited to be here and be able to announce the launch of figure markets Global Marketplace and we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute but to to get there I want to provide a little bit of background and context on figure and in particular what we've been doing over the last couple of years in the blockchain space um figure started back in 2018 and we started with the belief that blockchain is this transformative technology for markets that that the ability to displace trust with truth the ability to transact bilaterally without counterparty risk created a foundation to do something very different across Equity markets fixed income markets currency markets crypto markets and the first thing that we did is we started originating assets native to that Marketplace so we began originating loans on blockchain back in 2018 um we uh were the first to originate Consumer loans on blockchain that year we were the first to securitize them that year and then last year the first to get Triple red securitizations on blockchain assets and to date we've done about $40 billion of rwa lending and lending security transactions on chain and including uh right now about $14 billion of tvl uh of our assets on blockchain but what we really are set out to do is build this Marketplace and to do that one of the First Fundamental principles that we did is we stood up a Marketplace based on decentralized MPC custody so to us it's crazy that exchanges still operate the way that they do you have centralized actors centralized custody centralized clearing centralized marketplaces and when you do that you create a backdrop where you can have bad things happen and we saw those bad things happen with FTX we saw it with Celsius we saw it with blockfi in other situations and so what we did is we started looking at this multi-party computation wallet construct and the ability to keep Bitcoin on the Bitcoin Network ethereum on the ethereum Network cash on the provenance network and to be able to effectively Shard the key in a way that we could get perfected security interest and we could provide all the features that a centralized exchange does in terms of collateralization cross collateralization leverage but not have to take possession of the of the coin and to us that's that's a fundamental principle that it's crazy that after FTX the bulk of trading is still happening on centralized exchanges like binance and coinbase better providing that custody so decentralized MPC is the tenant of what we've done we launched our US exchange in August based on MPC technology and today we announc the launch of the global exchange also based on decentralized MPC backend The Exchange has all the normal bells and whistles that you'd expect we've got a relatively high yield cash sweep or we're providing 8% on stable coin balances we're providing cash leverage today at 5 to one with the expectation of the next couple of weeks we'll turn on perpetuals that'll be 10 to 20 to one on The Leverage side and we're cutting across a broad number of products so we've got crypto we've got um funds that are on there we're bringing fixed income securities on but one of the key things that we're focused is bringing Equity onto that Marketplace and in particular public Equity native to blockchain not tokenizing a security sitting over DTC but doing Equity that isn't self-registered on the chain and as part of that effort we're doing something that we think is relatively unique which is we're taking a portion of our cap table and we're doing a regs issuance of public Equity or of private Equity issuance into the first 5,000 folks who sign up onto the exchange and once we break 2500 shareholders we become a public reporting company and after 6 months the restriction on that Equity is lifted and it's freely tradable so this will be we believe the first public Equity trading native on chain six months after the launch of this process and we think that this is going to be hugely disruptive you're going to be able to take your figure equity and use as collateral to buy Bitcoin you're going to be able to take your Bitcoin and use this collateral to buy Equity you're going to have true cross collateralization and true public Equity native to chain so we're going to put this QR code out on social in a couple of hours so you've got a couple hours Head Start to take this down sign up and be eligible for that Equity uh process and Equity distribution and what we're really trying to do at the end of the day is build an exchange where everyone who trades on that exchange has an ownership interest on that exchange we want to make the Traders owners and we want to align and in particular if we do this and we do it successfully we think we're giving an opportunity for people that lost a lot in the bankruptcies and in FTX in particular to be able to earn their way back into something of high value as an owner of the exchange they trade through so super excited for for uh for sitting through thanks for the time today and I'm going to let people catch back up on the schedule thank you