As Wall Street firms race to bring stocks, bonds, and credit products onto blockchain rails, a new Ethereum-based marketplace backed by Animoca Brands aims to turn tokenized assets into something that crypto investors can use in decentralized finance (DeFi).
NUVA, developed by Animoca and Nuva Labs, connects approximately $19 billion in tokenized real-world assets sourced from the Provenance 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: Turning Blockchain into Wall Street’s New Plumbing
Real-world tokenized assets have become one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors. Asset managers and fintech companies see blockchain rails as a way to modernize the way financial products are issued, traded and used as collateral. According to predictions from multiple industries, the broader market for tokenized assets could reach trillions of dollars in the next decade.
NUVA is designed as a distribution layer for tokenized assets, allowing them to move beyond closed financial networks into DeFi markets, giving average retail users access to assets that are often limited to accredited investors.
It is debuting two flagship products: a Treasury-linked interest vault called nvYLDS, linked to Figure’s SEC-regulated stablecoin YLDS with an offering of more than $500 million, and nvPRIME, a token linked to Figure’s $18.4 billion portfolio of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). While the former provides investors with money market returns, the latter offers high single-digit returns – currently over 7% – that are mainly accessible to institutions and accredited investors in the traditional financial sector.
Anthony Moro, CEO of Nuva Labs and former BNY director, said the goal is to create a marketplace for blockchain-native financial assets instead of packaged versions of traditional products.
“No one 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-quality assets in a simple, composable format.”
Users deposit stablecoins into vaults and receive ERC-20 tokens that represent ownership of the underlying assets. These tokens can then be traded, lent, or posted as collateral via Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.
As the NUVA platform expands, Moro said he will “look for a broad range of assets to be available to everyone in an easy-to-use, self-driving and self-sustaining manner, eliminating the limited access, delay and high costs of Wall Street.”
Moro argued that many existing tokenization models still rely too heavily on off-chain infrastructure and manual tuning.
“The way to tokenize assets is not a digital twin,” he said. “The Figure loan itself is digitally proprietary. There is no filing cabinet anywhere where the real data is kept.”
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 from multiple issuers to NUVA and expand to other blockchains beyond Ethereum.
“Cheaper, faster and safer will win,” Moro said. “This is how all financial assets ultimately end up in the chain.”