GM. This is Milk Road, the secret seasoning that makes daily crypto market news digestible.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ The crypto stock beating most of AI.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin Just Pumped… But Is the Bear Market Really Over?
- 🍪 The real U.S. debt crisis trigger is Americans losing confidence.
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ONLY NVIDIA AND MICRON BEAT THIS CRYPTO STOCK 📈
Remember the other week when we were talking about the ‘Rule of 40’? It’s a quick sanity check investors run on fast-growing companies.
You add revenue growth to profit margin, and anything above 40 is considered healthy.
Well, Figure Technology (FIGR), the onchain lending platform, recently scored north of 150.
Our lead PRO analyst, M0xt, pulled up the S&P 500 rankings on The Milk Road Show this week, and only two companies sat above Figure: Nvidia and Micron.
(A home equity lender, hanging out in the semiconductor aisle. Wild!)
We went through the Q2 numbers last Friday, so let's do the bit we skipped: how a lender pulls off a score like that.
Because a few years ago, it couldn't have.
The old business had a hard ceiling. Figure paid to go find each homeowner, funded the loan out of its own pocket, then stopped once its pockets were empty.
(If you've got $100M, you can only write so many loans before the money runs out.)
So Figure rented its software out instead.
Any mortgage bank, credit union or fintech can originate loans on its rails now, and plenty want to, because doing it the traditional way costs roughly $11,000 per loan and takes around 40 days.
On Figure's system it's under $1,000, in 5-7 days.
Which flipped it so that third parties now write more loans on the platform than Figure itself.
In Q1 2025, Figure wrote 65% of the volume moving through its own marketplace. Last quarter, partners wrote 65% of it, with the partner count going from 144 to 489 over that same stretch. 👇
And partners haven’t just shifted their existing business over to Figure, they actually write ~2.6x more volume than they did before joining, because loans sell faster once more buyers are bidding on them.
The more partners turn up → the more each one of them lends.
Which makes it strange that the one number two analysts kept poking at on the earnings call was heading the wrong way…
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ONLY NVIDIA AND MICRON BEAT THIS CRYPTO STOCK (P2) 📈
The number that was put under the microscope on the earnings call was Figure’s take rate - i.e. its cut of every dollar of loan volume it handles.
It came in at 3.6%, the low end of the company's own 3.5% to 4% range.
With that came a split in opinion. Bank of America reiterated its Sell rating the next morning with a $31 target, while Needham reaffirmed FIGR as a Buy with a $55 target.
As for our analysts? M0xt thinks the bears have it backwards.
Figure isn't paying to acquire those borrowers anymore, so a smaller cut on a partner's loan is worth more to it than a bigger cut on its own.
Partners also earn cheaper pricing as their volume grows, which drags the average down while both sides make more money.
And the company's own numbers back M0xt up.
Adjusted net revenue grew 95% last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA (profit before interest, tax and accounting charges) grew 126%.
Margin went from 47.2% to 54.6%, or roughly 52% once you strip out a one-off $5.9M gain the CFO called out - and for the first time ever, fees on loans Figure never funded became its single biggest source of revenue.
The cool part: because all of this settles onchain, you don't have to wait around for quarterly results to see how it's going.
M0xt says July's onchain volume already supports the Q3 guidance of $4.8B to $5.2B.
Figure still holds ~$360M of loans itself to seed liquidity, costing it 1.7 points of margin, and it borrowed $600M at 8.5% to fund its Kiavi acquisition (which should add 40% to volume and $100M of EBITDA).
Where M0xt sits now: still bullish, but not adding at these prices.
He first bought at $25.34 in February and plans to hold two or three more quarters while Kiavi works its way into the numbers.
Then, at around $50, he’ll start trimming.
If you don’t want to miss another early call from our analysts, it’s time to go PRO.
On August 26 (next Wednesday), PRO goes up from $25-39/m and $250-299/y for new members.
Join before then, and you keep today's price for as long as you're a member.
Here’s why it’s worth it:
Melvin runs one of our top-performing portfolios. He launched it in February and it's up 45% since.
If you'd put $10,000 behind his moves, you'd be sitting on about $4,500 in gains.
Five months of PRO cost $125. Is there a better ROI on any investment right now?
My suggestion: go PRO before it’s too late.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Novogratz: The real U.S. debt crisis trigger is Americans losing confidence. "When you have domestic capital flight, all hell breaks loose."
Blue Macellari: "All anybody wants to talk about is how we're getting to 24/7 trading in U.S. equities. You know how that's going to happen? It's got to be onchain."
Saylor: "Study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents could never... If your parents would say that's magic, you're on the right track."
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