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 crypto investors can use across decentralized finance (DeFi).
Developed by Animoca and Nuva Labs, NUVA connects approximately $19 billion worth of tokenized real assets originating from the Provenance blockchain ecosystem, including private credit and finance-related products linked to Figure Technologies Solutions (FIGR), the blockchain company founded by former SoFi CEO Mike Cagney.
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Real-world tokenized assets have become one of crypto’s fastest growing sectors. Asset managers and fintech companies 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 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 restricted to institutional investors.
It is debuting two flagship products: a government bond-linked yield box called nvYLDS, linked to Figure’s SEC-regulated stablecoin YLDS with more than $500 million in supplies, and nvPRIME, a token linked to Figure’s $18.4 billion portfolio of private equity lines of credit (HELOC). While the former provides investors with money market returns, the latter offers high single-digit returns – more than 7% currently – which are mostly available 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 packaged versions of traditional products.
“No one really has the 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 assets in a single, composite 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 pledged across Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.
As the NUVA platform expands, Moro said to “look for a broad range of assets to be available to everyone in an easy-to-use, self-managed and autonomous way, 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 voting.
“The way to tokenize assets is not a digital twin,” he said. “The figure loan itself is digitally native. There is no filing cabinet somewhere that keeps 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 bring a variety of tokenized assets to 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 end up on the chain.”
