A quiet but radical experiment is taking shape at the intersection of blockchain and public markets.
Instead of tokenizing stocks or wrapping traditional shares in digital form, a new initiative aims to move the entire equity issuance and ownership process onto a blockchain – potentially changing how shares are created, traded, and financed.
Key Takeaways
Figure plans to issue real company shares directly on a blockchain.
OPEN removes many traditional equity market intermediaries.
Investors can hold, trade, and lend shares on-chain.
Crypto-linked firms see potential to reduce valuation discounts.
Rebuilding equity markets from the ground up
Figure Technology Solutions is preparing to roll out the On-Chain Public Equity Network, known as OPEN. The idea is simple but ambitious: companies issue their shares natively on a blockchain rather than through legacy market infrastructure. These shares are not synthetic tokens or blockchain representations of existing stock. They are the equity itself.
OPEN runs on Figure’s Provenance blockchain and allows investors to hold shares directly in digital wallets. Ownership, transfer, and lending of shares all occur on-chain, reducing reliance on the layers of intermediaries that dominate today’s public markets.
What disappears when equity goes on-chain
In traditional markets, equity ownership depends on a web of centralized entities – stock exchanges, clearing houses, custodians, and prime brokers. OPEN is designed to bypass much of that structure. Shares can be lent, borrowed, or traded directly between participants, with the blockchain acting as the source of truth.
Mike Cagney says the model replaces institutional coordination with software-driven settlement. Rather than reconciling ownership across multiple systems, the ledger itself defines who owns what at any moment.
Figure plans to demonstrate the model by issuing its own equity on OPEN, making it both the platform operator and the first issuer.
From lending rails to capital markets
Figure’s background helps explain the move. Founded in 2018, the company initially focused on blockchain-based lending products, including home equity lines of credit. It later went public, raising close to $800 million, bringing regulatory and capital-markets experience into its blockchain operations.
Cagney previously led SoFi Technologies, and that blend of fintech and crypto thinking shows up in OPEN’s design. Rather than eliminating institutions entirely, the platform could give them new roles. Prime brokers, for example, could build lending and cross-collateralization services on top of on-chain equity instead of managing settlement and custody.
Why crypto-heavy public companies are interested
Some of the earliest interest in OPEN is coming from digital-asset treasury firms, companies that raise capital largely to hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets. A well-known example of this structure is Strategy Inc..
Many of these firms have recently traded below the value of their underlying crypto holdings. Figure believes on-chain equity could help address that gap. Because OPEN supports digital wallets and token-based settlement, investors could buy shares using cryptocurrencies directly, without converting to fiat.
In theory, this would allow faster tender offers, more efficient capital raises, and tighter alignment between a company’s market price and its net asset value.
A different vision for tokenization
Most blockchain experiments in equities focus on wrapping existing stocks with digital tokens while leaving the core market structure intact. OPEN takes the opposite approach. It treats blockchain as the primary system of record, not a supplementary layer.
If successful, this model could blur the boundaries between crypto networks and capital markets, creating a new category of publicly traded companies whose shares behave more like programmable assets than traditional securities.
OPEN is still early, and adoption is far from guaranteed. But the direction is clear: rather than fitting blockchain into old financial systems, Figure is testing what happens when equity markets are designed for blockchains from the start.
