Figure Technology Solutions went public on Nasdaq under the ticker FIGR in September 2025, and the IPO put a fresh spotlight on a company that has been quietly shipping onchain financial products since 2018. Most crypto headlines treat YLDS, the SEC-registered yield-bearing certificate Figure issues, as if it appeared from nowhere when it landed on Stellar on May 5, 2026. It did not. YLDS first launched on Provenance Blockchain in February 2025, expanded to Solana in November 2025, and reached Stellar this week. Each chain hop sits on top of a stack that already includes a purpose-built blockchain, a lending business, a capital-markets venue, and a licensed certificate issuer. This article walks through each piece and how the parts fit together.
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Figure is one of the few US public companies that owns a full vertical stack for onchain dollar products: a public blockchain, a consumer-loan origination engine, a registered trading venue, a licensed certificate issuer, and broker-dealer affiliates. That combination is rare, and it shapes how YLDS reaches the market and which compliance levers Figure pulls that offshore issuers cannot.
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Most stablecoin issuers operate one or two layers. Tether is an offshore reserve manager. Circle is a US money services business that mints USDC and partners with exchanges for distribution. Figure looks structurally different because the same parent company touches loan origination, secondary trading, asset-backed structuring, and a registered yield-bearing certificate, all anchored by securities-law registrations rather than money-transmitter licenses alone.
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Provenance Blockchain is a public, Cosmos SDK-based network that Figure helped launch in 2018 and spun out to the nonprofit Provenance Blockchain Foundation in 2021. Figure used it as the system of record for loan origination, asset-backed securitizations, and fund administration well before broader RWA tooling existed elsewhere. It is also where YLDS first went live in February 2025.
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The chain still hosts billions in tokenized loans, funds, and stablecoin activity, with HASH as its native token and a validator set that includes financial-services firms. Figure's early bet was that home equity lines of credit and private fund interests needed an auditable, permissioned-friendly ledger, and Provenance was built to that spec. Documentation lives at docs.provenance.io, and the foundation publishes governance and validator data separately from Figure's corporate disclosures.
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Figure Lending is the consumer-credit arm. It originates home equity lines of credit, mortgage refinances, and other consumer loans, and records each loan onchain on Provenance through eNote technology. The company's S-1 describes Figure as one of the largest non-bank HELOC originators in the United States.
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The mechanic that makes this interesting for crypto readers: every loan is born digital. The promissory note, the lien data, the servicing record, and the eventual securitization sit on the same ledger. That removes a lot of the reconciliation friction that drags on traditional asset-backed finance, and it is the reason institutional buyers have been willing to absorb Figure-originated paper through the Provenance pipeline. Origination volumes and securitization counterparties are detailed in Figure's S-1 and subsequent filings on SEC EDGAR.
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Figure Markets is a registered broker-dealer affiliate operating an exchange for crypto and tokenized securities. Figure Connect is the marketplace where loan originators sell whole loans to institutional buyers, with the trade lifecycle settled onchain. Together they cover the two ends of secondary distribution.
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Markets handles retail and institutional access to crypto, stablecoins, and tokenized assets through a registered-broker structure. Connect handles wholesale loan trading between originators and buyers like asset managers, banks, and insurance companies. Both depend on Provenance for settlement and recordkeeping, which keeps the data layer consistent across origination, trading, and reporting. Product details and counterparty lists are published on figure.com and in Figure's investor materials.
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Figure Certificate Company is a separately incorporated subsidiary registered with the SEC as a face-amount certificate company under Section 28 of the Investment Company Act of 1940. It is the legal entity that issues YLDS. The certificate-company structure is what allows YLDS to be sold as a registered security with prospectus-level disclosure rather than as an unregistered stablecoin.
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Face-amount certificate companies are an old but rarely used corner of US securities law. The framework was designed in the 1930s for products that promise to pay a fixed dollar amount at maturity, backed by the issuer's general assets. Only a handful of firms have ever registered under it, which is part of why YLDS stands out: Figure is reusing a real, dusty piece of the 1940 Act to issue a digital, yield-bearing dollar product. Background on the structure and the few registered competitors lives in our companion piece on SEC-registered stablecoins and face-amount certificates.
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YLDS is an unsecured face-amount certificate issued by Figure Certificate Company. It pays interest at SOFR minus 0.50%, accrued daily and paid monthly in USD or in additional YLDS tokens, per Figure Markets' launch documentation. Reserves are held in short-duration US Treasuries and Treasury repurchase agreements per the Solana launch disclosures.
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The chain rollout happened in three steps. The table below summarizes the verified timeline.

Treat the SOFR-minus-50bps rate as the headline yield disclosed in Figure's 2025 launch documentation; the rate floats with the underlying SOFR benchmark. Our pillar article on what YLDS is tracks the prospectus supplement and any rate adjustments Figure publishes for the Stellar deployment.
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Figure already runs Provenance, and YLDS already trades on Solana. Adding Stellar is a distribution decision, not a technical one. Stellar hosts Franklin Templeton's BENJI, WisdomTree's WTGXX Treasury Money Market Digital Fund, Ondo's USDY, and other tokenized RWA products, and public sources put Stellar's onchain RWA total somewhere between roughly $1.2 billion (per Messari's Q1 2026 State of Stellar report) and $2 billion-plus (per the Stellar Development Foundation's own May 5 framing). Either way, the existing rail is hard to recreate on a chain Figure controls.
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A few specific advantages worth naming, without putting words in Figure's mouth:

The Stellar choice also keeps Provenance focused on what it does best, which is loan and securitization recordkeeping, while a separate consumer-facing chain carries the dollar product to retail wallets. Figure has not published a public memo explaining the chain choice beyond the press release language, so the strategic logic above is inference, not company guidance.
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Figure's stack relies on securities-law registrations that Circle and Tether do not hold. The compact below summarizes the differences as disclosed in each issuer's filings or attestations.

This is not a quality ranking. It is a structural contrast. A registered face-amount certificate gives holders prospectus-level disclosure and a trustee, but it also limits who can buy it and on what terms. A money-transmitter stablecoin like USDC clears faster across exchanges but does not pay yield to holders. Each wrapper trades flexibility for consumer protection in a different way.
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A US-public, SEC-registered issuer paying SOFR minus 50 bps on dollars matters for two reasons. It pulls regulated competition closer to Circle's core market, and it gives institutional buyers a wrapper they can hold without the legal hedges they apply to offshore stablecoins.
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Expect three near-term effects. First, more issuers will explore the face-amount certificate route now that Figure has a working multi-chain template. Second, fintechs and neobanks that wanted to offer yield but could not custody securities can white-label a registered onchain option. Third, Circle and Tether face pressure to either ship a compliant yield product or accept that interest-paying competitors will pull treasury balances. Stellar's broader RWA buildout, which we cover in the Stellar tokenized RWA ecosystem 2026 overview, is the distribution surface where this competition plays out first.
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This article draws on Figure Technology Solutions' S-1 and subsequent disclosures filed with the SEC, Figure Markets' February 2025 YLDS launch documentation, Figure's November 2025 Solana expansion press release, the Stellar Development Foundation's May 5, 2026 announcement, Provenance Blockchain Foundation documentation, and the registration framework for face-amount certificate companies under Section 28 of the Investment Company Act of 1940. Where public sources diverged (notably Stellar RWA TVL between Messari's $1.2B figure and SDF's $2B-plus figure), the article cites both rather than picking one.