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Mike Cagney
Co-Founder and CEO at Figure Markets. Views are my own and not investment advice.
Mike Cagney is an accomplished entrepreneur and macroeconomist with a passion for building companies, particularly in the financial services sector, and a keen interest in markets.
His diverse expertise spans financial services, hedge funds, blockchain, fintech, macro trading, and entrepreneurialism.
Education wise, Mike pursued his MS in Management at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, his MS in Applied Economics, and his BA in Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He has held pivotal roles in various organizations, including being the former Co-Founder and CEO of Figure Markets, Former Executive Board Chair at Figure, and Former Executive Board Chair at Figure Acquisition Corp I (NYSE
Notable past positions include Co-Founder and CEO at Figure, Co-Founder and CEO of Social Finance (SoFi), Board Chair at ReFlow Services, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Cabezon Investment Group, Co-Founder and CEO at Finaplex, and SVP of Proprietary Trading and Financial Products at Wells Fargo.
Highlights
Crypto tokens have three primary drivers for value: yield, utility and governance.
Yield – what does the token pay you to hold it? Yield is derived from gas and other fees on the blockchain.
Utility – what benefits to I get holding the token? Do I pay reduced fees, get better loan rates, etc.
Governance – how does the token support decentralization, the token foundation and allow for voting relating to yield and utility?
There is a fourth driver – novelty – but I’m leaving that out as I don’t believe in it.
So when you think about what a token should be worth, things like “ecosystem” and even “TVL” don’t really matter, other than they can indicate how many fees – and thus yield – is being paid into the system.
Activity like token burns only matter when it translates to higher yield per token. Burning tokens that don't pay yield doesn't help.
Inflationary token rewards benefit particular token holders (those getting the rewards) but are actually counterproductive to the overall token community, as they reduce each token’s share of yield and dilute each token’s governance role.
I believe what @provenancefdn is doing with $HASH is the right token model.
The blockchain has the highest RWA TVL of public chains, but it ranks around 12th in total fees across all L1s. Fees matter more than TVL. The Provenance Blockchain Foundation is working with Figure to enhance network fees while growing the overall fee-paying ecosystem.
The Foundation is working with Figure to deliver utility to HASH holders through things like discounts on loan rates, higher DeFi yields and more.
The Foundation is standing up easy “one $HASH, one vote” quorum for voting to make it easy to ensure clear, visible governance.
$HASH can't be created, and the Foundation is actively working to burn $HASH for deflation.
And while I don’t count novelty, it is pretty cool to say you just bought some $HASH.
Lots of news about crypto companies pursuing banking charters. I think this is a mistake on several fronts.
First, the nature of banks is as a centralized agent. That’s orthogonal to the value of blockchain. As more and more tradfi firm lean into blockchain (because now they can) they are going to try to use the same centralized model (e.g., DTC as custodian, interchange as payment rails, prime brokerage as capital allocators and banks as depositor/lender). This will ultimately be a losers gambit as centralized systems are adjacent to (and at conflict with), but not part of, blockchain. Decentralization will ultimately win here.
Second, administrations change. We (Figure) almost became a bank four years ago when Brian Brooks was acting commissioner of the OCC. The bank charter process extended past Brian’s term and into Hsu’s, and we fell into regulatory purgatory – trying for a bank based on public blockchain when the regulators adopted the position that public blockchain was bad. What’s going to happen if these companies become banks and the regulators change in four years, going back to the “crypto is bad” mantra? It’s pretty hard to “undo” being a bank.
Third, being a bank changes your valuation metric. Rather than priced to earnings, almost every bank is priced to book. That’s because regulators force banks to scale equity capital with activity (revenue), making high (software-like) return on equity difficult to impossible to achieve.
Finally, banking is about to face a seismic overhaul. The upcoming stablecoin legislation is going to be the beginning of a movement towards narrow banking through deposit flight (I’ll write more on this later). Do these entities really want to be a bank when they won’t have access to cheap deposits?
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