Mike Cagney on What Makes Blockchain Special

Mike Cagney has made a real name for himself in the blockchains pace. He is the co-founder of Sofi and the current CEO of Figure. He’s also made public the Provenance blockchain, which has supported about $12 million in transactions at the time of writing.

Mike Cagney on Blockchain

In a recent interview, he talked about just how prominent blockchain is. He also delved a bit into what his company does, saying:

One of the most important roles that I play with Figure and supporting the Provenance ecosystem is just evangelizing the use cases for blockchain and trying to make them as tangible and accessible as possible. The most fundamental thing that we strive for is the idea that blockchain allows you to displace trust with truth, so it allows you to create native digital assets where I can look at those assets and know for certain their ownership composition and history, and it allows you to transact bilaterally so that you and I can transact without an intermediate.

Cagney has always been positive when it comes to blockchain, and this is a narrative he’s carried with him since his early Sofi days. He mentioned:

When I was at Sofi, I talked a lot about blockchain, but I didn’t really understand what it was and what the power of it was, so I just had an aha moment of this disintermediation construct, where I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is huge. This is probably one of the most transformative technologies that we’ll experience in our lifetime.’

Addressing the lack of women working in blockchain and crypto, he mentioned the following about what is largely a male-dominated industry:

We achieved a lot of great things at Sofi, and we learned a lot as well. We have taken those learnings with us in starting Figure, particularly around culture. One of the biggest changes we incorporated at Figure is hiring people for culture first. When you prioritize ability and skill set during recruitment, you can often leave culture as an afterthought. That then leads to an environment where bad behaviors are tolerated when they shouldn’t be, simply because they’re coming from top performers. Our president and head of lending are both women, and that diversity transcends through not just the executive team but also the organization, where we have higher representation of women in product and engineering than tech/fintech averages.

Joining Banks and Crypto Together

He concluded with:

When we built Provenance and made it public, we went to a bunch of banks early on, and my thesis was, ‘Hey, you could do a securitization on here and save, you know, roughly 90 basis points,’ and every bank universally said, ‘This is great. We love it. We’d like to be the 10th bank to do a securitization on here.’

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