As Wall Street firms race to bring stocks, bonds and credit products onto the blockchain rails, a new Ethereum-based marketplace backed by Animoca Brands aims to turn tokenized assets into something crypto investors can use as part of decentralized finance (DeFi).
NUVA, developed by Animoca and Nuva Labs, connects approximately $19 billion in real-world tokenized assets from Provenance’s blockchain ecosystem, including private credit and treasury-linked products linked to Figure Technologies Solutions (FIGR), the blockchain company founded by former SoFi CEO Mike Cagney.
Read more: Mike Cagney’s second act: making blockchain the new Wall Street plumbing
Tokenized real-world assets have become one of the fastest growing sectors in crypto. Asset managers and fintech companies see blockchain rails as a way to modernize the way financial products are issued, traded and used as collateral. The broader market for tokenized assets could reach billions of dollars over the next decade, according to several industry forecasts.
NUVA was designed as a distribution layer for tokenized assets, allowing them to move beyond closed financial networks and into DeFi markets, giving average retail users access to assets often limited to institutional investors.
It is debuting two flagship products: a Treasury-linked yield vault called nvYLDS, linked to Figure’s SEC-regulated YLDS stablecoin with a supply of over $500 million, and nvPRIME, a token linked to Figure’s $18.4 billion portfolio of home equity lines of credit (HELOC). While the former offers investors a money market yield, the latter offers a high single-digit yield – over 7% currently – which is primarily accessible to institutions and accredited investors in traditional finance.
Anthony Moro, CEO of Nuva Labs and former BNY executive, said the goal was to create a market for blockchain-native financial assets rather than wrapped versions of traditional products.
“No one really has this unified global distribution layer for blockchain-native assets,” Moro said in an interview. “We believed there was a lack of a platform that allowed users to access institutional-grade assets in a simple, composable format.”
Users deposit stablecoins into vaults and receive ERC-20 tokens representing ownership of the underlying assets. These tokens can then be traded, loaned, or deposited as collateral on Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.
As the NUVA platform grows, Moro said he “will seek to make a broad range of assets accessible to everyone in an easy-to-use, self-managed and self-custodial manner, eliminating the limited access, time lag and high fees of Wall Street.”
Moro argued that many existing tokenization models still rely too heavily on off-chain infrastructure and manual reconciliation.
“The way to tokenize assets is not a digital twin,” he said. “The Loan Figure itself is digitally native. There is no filing cabinet somewhere to keep the actual record.”
Figure has become one of the largest issuers of blockchain-based private credit products through the Provenance network. Moro said the broader vision is to eventually bring a range of tokenized assets to NUVA from multiple issuers and expand to other blockchains beyond Ethereum.
“The cheapest, fastest and safest will win,” Moro said. “This is how all financial assets end up on-chain.”
