NUVA, co-developed by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, has linked $19 billion of Figure Technologies' tokenised assets — including a $18.4 billion HELOC portfolio — to Ethereum DeFi through two new products: nvYLDS and nvPRIME.
NUVA, a curated marketplace co-developed by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, went live on Ethereum on May 12 with $19 billion of tokenised real-world assets sourced from Figure Technologies. Two products launched on day one: nvYLDS, a yield vault wrapping Figure's SEC-regulated YLDS stablecoin, and nvPRIME, a token backed by Figure's $18.4 billion home equity line of credit portfolio currently paying above 7 per cent. Both can now be traded, lent, or posted as collateral across any DeFi protocol that accepts ERC-20 tokens.
The chief executive of Nuva Labs is Anthony Moro, who spent more than two decades at BNY Mellon, the world's largest custodian. His pitch is that Wall Street's existing tokenisation efforts have produced wrapped versions of products that already work in traditional markets — money market funds on a ledger, basically — when what DeFi actually needs is access to assets it could never touch before. HELOCs are a useful test case. They are illiquid by design, originated through bank-like underwriting, and historically pay yields a traditional retail investor can't reach without going through a manager.
Figure originated those HELOCs on Provenance, the Cosmos-based chain it has been quietly running since 2018. The Provenance ledger holds the actual loan records. nvPRIME is a representation of a slice of that book, issued by Nuva, distributed on Ethereum, and verified by AnChain.AI's compliance monitoring. Users deposit a stablecoin into the vault and receive ERC-20 tokens proportional to their share. Yield accrues from the underlying loan payments. There is no synthetic exposure; the on-chain accounting is supposed to mirror Figure's books in real time.
This is the part that has been missing from every previous attempt to bring institutional credit to DeFi. BlackRock's BUIDL fund tokenises Treasuries. Ondo's offerings tokenise Treasuries. Coinbase Asset Management's CUSHY fund tokenises private credit. All sit on top of products that already had liquid wrappers in TradFi. NUVA's first product is a token that has no analogous retail vehicle in the offline world. You cannot, today, walk into a brokerage and buy a slice of someone else's HELOC.
Moro framed the strategy in launch materials as building "a marketplace for blockchain-native financial assets rather than wrapped versions of traditional products." The Treasury vault, nvYLDS, is conventional enough — it's an SEC-regulated stablecoin generating yield from short-dated US debt. The HELOC token is the strategic bet. If retail demand materialises, NUVA has a moat that other tokenisation platforms cannot easily copy without an originator the size of Figure on the other end. Figure's $18.4 billion portfolio is real assets, not paper exposure.
The risks are also real. Home equity lines of credit are second-lien positions; they sit behind the first mortgage in any default. They are pre-payable, which means duration is unpredictable. Yields above 7 per cent reflect those risks — they are not a free lunch dressed up in DeFi clothing. The product disclosures will need to make that distinction obvious to retail users who have spent the last three years being told that "tokenised RWA yield" means short-dated Treasuries.
Animoca's role is distribution. The Hong Kong-based firm is best known for its blockchain gaming portfolio, but it has been investing aggressively across tokenised assets infrastructure for two years. Founder Yat Siu has positioned the company as the connective tissue between institutional issuers and on-chain consumer applications. The NUVA partnership is the largest single deployment of that thesis to date. Animoca also has a network of integrations across Asia that Figure, a US-focused lender, would otherwise have no access to.
Regulatory exposure is the other open question. nvYLDS sits behind a stablecoin that the SEC has already approved; nvPRIME sits behind a credit instrument that has not been subject to the same scrutiny. The structure relies on Nuva acting as a regulated issuer of the tokens, not a broker-dealer. That distinction matters because the SEC's April interpretation on crypto assets carved out specific categories — digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital securities — but did not directly address tokenised credit instruments issued through a non-bank intermediary. Either NUVA will set a precedent or the SEC will close the gap.
The $19 billion figure deserves scrutiny too. That number describes the total tokenised assets sitting in Figure's portfolio on Provenance, not the amount Nuva expects to flow through nvPRIME on day one. Initial nvPRIME supply will be a small fraction of that, scaling with vault deposits. The headline is the addressable market, not the launch size.
Bernstein analysts have called 2026 the start of a "tokenisation supercycle"; whether that's marketing or analysis depends on whether products like NUVA find demand outside the existing DeFi user base. The first 90 days of deposit flow will tell. Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs have committed to publishing weekly TVL data through the marketplace's analytics dashboard.
