BofA Hiked Figure's Target 58% — the Blockchain Story Hides a Shrinking Take Rate

On September 9, Bank of America's broker-dealer lifted Figure Technology Solutions (Nasdaq: FIGR) from Underperform to Neutral and nearly doubled its price target, from $31 to $49 — a roughly 58% hike that headlines carried as a stamp of approval for a "blockchain lending" play. Read the actual note first: the rating went from Underperform to Neutral, not to Buy, and the new $49 target still sits below the Street average of about $52. Figure's stock, trading near $38 after its 2025 IPO, has already climbed most of the way toward the target BofA calls fair. The headline is real arithmetic on a stale number, not a fresh endorsement.

What BofA was finally conceding is that Figure's marketplace is growing fast. The company connects borrowers — mainly homeowners seeking home-equity lines of credit — with institutional capital providers, and, in the company's framing, each HELOC runs across its Provenance blockchain. In the second quarter consumer loan marketplace volume hit $4.3 billion, up 132% from a year earlier, beating management's own guidance. On the face of it, that is the kind of scale an upgrade story is built on.

The game BofA is now scoring

The useful question is what that volume produces, and the answer is a shrinking cut. Figure's net take rate — the revenue it keeps for every dollar of loan marketplace volume — fell to 3.6% in the second quarter from 4.0% a year earlier. The reason is the mix of the business. Figure Connect, a capital-light marketplace that carries a lower take rate, jumped to about $2.8 billion of that $4.3 billion, or 65% of volume, up from 56% the prior quarter and 42% a year ago. Volume is growing faster than the economics per unit of volume, so the company is winning scale while capturing less of each dollar that flows through it.

This is a familiar trade-off, and it is not on its own a flaw. Figure Connect is capital-light, so a lower take rate on more volume can still improve margins; adjusted EBITDA margin reached 54.6% in the quarter, up roughly 700 basis points year over year, and adjusted net revenue rose 95% to $218 million. Management frames the shift as a deliberate move toward a fee-style marketplace. The caution is that the take rate has been trending toward the bottom, not the top, of its guided 3.5%–4.0% band, partly because interest rates are hurting gain on loan sales and because lower-margin first-lien lending is growing faster than home-equity refinancing.

What the blockchain label does and doesn't buy

Figure is genuinely a blockchain story: every HELOC it originates is processed on the Provenance chain, and the company has added a registered stablecoin and tokenized assets. But the label risks hiding what is actually producing the revenue. In the first half of 2025, HELOC originations and loan sales contributed about 75% of Figure's revenue — a lending and distribution business, not a technology-licensing business. What has made Figure Connect the fastest growth engine is not the ledger; it is origination scale. The network grew to 489 active origination partners in the quarter, up 102 sequentially, and BofA's own upgrade note ties the momentum to revenue growth from the marketplace, not to the on-chain plumbing.

Think of it as distribution doing the work while the technology supplies the story. A capital marketplace is valuable when borrowers and lenders keep returning and when the intermediary captures a durable share of the flow. Figure has the first half of that — volume that compounds and fees that fall as volume rises. The second half is unproved: whether the take rate stabilizes or keeps sliding as the mix tilts further toward lower-margin marketplaces. A skeptic following money flow would note that BofA spent seven months at Underperform — downgrading in February 2026 on growth and risk concerns — and has now returned to Neutral, still the most cautious major call in a consensus that is otherwise a Buy at $52.

That is the boundary the upgrade actually draws. Figure has proven it can originate and redistribute a large, fast-growing pool of consumer credit, and it does so with discipline and cash (about $1.4 billion). What it has not proven is that it can keep a stable, expanding share of every dollar it moves, or that the blockchain distinguishes it from any well-run online lender once the ledger is not what's driving the revenue. Any fair-value multiple depends on how those two questions resolve. The take rate, not the 58% headline, is the number worth watching — a rising or stable cut to volume would mean durable value capture, and a continued slide would mean a marketplace that creates usage while its per-dollar economics erode.