As Wall Street firms race to bring stocks, bonds and credit products onto blockchain rails, a new Ethereum-based marketplace backed by Animoca Brands is aiming to turn tokenized assets into something crypto investors can use across decentralized finance (DeFi).
NUVA, developed by Animoca and Nuva Labs, is connecting around $19 billion worth of tokenized real-world assets originating on the Provenance blockchain ecosystem, including private credit and Treasury-linked products tied to Figure Technologies Solutions (FIGR), the blockchain firm founded by former SoFi CEO Mike Cagney.
Read more: Mike Cagney’s second act: Turning blockchain into Wall Street’s new plumbing
Tokenized real-world assets have become one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors. Asset managers and fintech firms view blockchain rails as a way to modernize how financial products are issued, traded and used as collateral. The broader market for tokenized assets could reach trillions of dollars over the next decade, according to multiple 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 accredited investors.
It debuts with two flagship products: a Treasury-linked yield vault called nvYLDS, tied to Figure’s SEC-regulated stablecoin YLDS with more than $500 million supply, and nvPRIME, a token tied to Figure’s $18.4 billion portfolio of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). While the former gives investors money market yield, the latter offers high single-digit yield — more than 7% currently — that is mostly accessible to institutions and accredited investors in traditional finance.
Anthony Moro, CEO of Nuva Labs and a former BNY executive, said the goal is to create a marketplace for blockchain-native financial assets rather than wrapped versions of traditional products.
“Nobody really has that unified global distribution layer for blockchain-native assets,” Moro said in an interview. “We thought what was missing was a platform where users could access institutional-grade assets in a simple, composable format.”
Users deposit stablecoins into vaults and receive ERC-20 tokens representing ownership in the underlying assets. Those tokens can then be traded, lent or posted as collateral across Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.
As the NUVA platform expands, Moro said to “look for a wide range of assets to be available to everyone in an easy to use, self-directed and self custodial manner, eliminating Wall Street’s limited access, time lag and high fees.”
Moro argued that many existing tokenization models still rely too heavily on offchain infrastructure and manual reconciliation.
“The way to tokenize assets isn’t a digital twin,” he said. “The Figure loan itself is digitally native. There’s no filing cabinet somewhere keeping the real 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 onto NUVA from multiple issuers and expand to other blockchains beyond Ethereum.
“Cheaper, faster and safer will win,” Moro said. “That’s how all financial assets eventually come onchain.”