In Brief:
- Chainlink has been named exclusive data infrastructure provider by NUVA, the real-world asset marketplace that Animoca Brands built together with Nuva Labs.
- nvPRIME leads the rollout — a private credit vault holding exposure to short-term financing that sits on top of U.S. residential housing loans, HELOCs included.
- Pricing an RWA token as collateral in lending markets hinges on valuation data, and that is precisely what the oracle layer delivers to DeFi protocols.
For its real-world asset marketplace, NUVA has made Chainlink the exclusive data infrastructure, relying on the network to feed on-chain data that values listed assets and prices them as collateral.
Leading the coverage is nvPRIME, NUVA’s private credit vault. The product carries exposure to short-term financing collateralized by residential housing loans, U.S. home equity lines of credit among them.
NUVA by @animocabrands & @NUVALabs adopts Chainlink as its exclusive data infra to bring institutional RWAs to DeFi.
The first asset powered is nvPRIME, which represents exposure to short-term financing backed by residential housing loans including U.S. HELOCs.@ChainlinkView on X ↗
The significance of that runs deeper than it first appears. Without a feed, a lending protocol sitting on a HELOC-backed token simply cannot mark it — the smart contract running the position is effectively blind to what it holds. It is Chainlink’s data that gives DeFi protocols the ability to manage lending positions against the asset.
What nvPRIME holds
Inside the vault are native PRIME tokens, which carry exposure to prime home equity credit that Figure Technology Solutions and its partners originate. Depositors put in USDC and get back tokens standing for their proportional share of what the vault holds.
More than $18 billion has been funded in residential housing through the Figure HELOC portfolio underpinning the product. Yields on nvPRIME are targeted north of 7%.
The marketplace’s other launch product, nvYLDS, is a Treasury-linked vault constructed around YLDS — an SEC-registered instrument backed by short-dated Treasurys and bank deposits, with circulating supply north of $500 million.
The Animoca and Figure pipe
May 13 marked NUVA’s debut on Ethereum mainnet, wiring roughly $19 billion of tokenized assets that originate on Provenance Blockchain into Ethereum applications. Vault tokens are issued as ERC-20s on a non-custodial platform, leaving holders free to trade, lend or post them as collateral.
The marketplace was co-created by Animoca Brands alongside Nuva Labs, the firm previously called Provenance Blockchain Labs. In Animoca’s framing, NUVA serves as an institutional distribution layer sitting between DeFi and TradFi, carrying the more than $23 billion in RWA total value locked on Provenance Blockchain over to other chains.
Accompanying the Ethereum launch was a partnership that establishes NUVA as a primary distribution partner for Hastra’s PRIME on Ethereum. Backing Hastra is Figure Technology Solutions, a Nasdaq-listed company trading under FIGR that was founded by Mike Cagney, formerly chief executive of SoFi.
Nuva Labs CEO Anthony Moro, previously an executive at BNY, has made the case that the conventional tokenization playbook depends too much on off-chain records and manual reconciliation. Loans from Figure, he said, are digitally native — there is no filing cabinet storing the real record — which means no “digital twin” is required.
“Nobody really has that unified global distribution layer for blockchain-native assets,” Moro said.
Building out the stack
Infrastructure partners have been stacking up at NUVA over the course of the year. February brought in AnChain.AI, which monitors security and compliance across the marketplace using its agentic AI AML product.
April saw Nuva Digital — the Nuva Labs subsidiary and Animoca joint venture operating the platform — close a $5.2 million seed round led by Morgan Creek Digital, with Ulu Ventures also participating. The round was the startup’s first outside capital.
Then in June, $25 million in mortgage loans were tokenized on Provenance by Nuva Labs and Black Lake. According to Moro, a dedicated vault hands the market “a more transparent, programmable way to work with real credit.”
NUVA Points accrue to vault depositors, a mechanism the company frames as linking early users to the marketplace’s longer-term growth. A NUVA utility token is also on Nuva Digital’s roadmap, though Moro has not been willing to spell out its role or timing.
Onboarding assets from additional issuers and moving beyond Ethereum is the stated plan, according to Moro. “Cheaper, faster and safer will win,” he said.