Gaming Pioneer and Asset Manager Team Up on Tokenization

Photo: Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, and Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, announced the partnership at TOKEN2049 in Singapore.

NUVA is a marketplace for tokenized assets — where ownership of a real-world asset, such as a loan or a fund, is represented as a digital token on a blockchain, and can be traded, lent out or used as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi). The platform was developed by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, and runs as a separate institutional venture alongside Animoca's gaming and Web3 business.

Franklin Templeton joins the partnership

Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson and Animoca founder Yat Siu announced a strategic partnership on October 9, at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore. Franklin Templeton is no newcomer to the crypto sector — its Franklin Templeton Digital Assets division has been active in the blockchain and crypto ecosystem since 2018, including through the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund.

– I've said before that crypto and traditional finance have largely lived as two parallel universes. We're starting to see those universes converge, says Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton.

– The convergence between traditional finance and digital assets has moved from the theoretical to becoming a real infrastructure play, says Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands.

Cultural assets as the next step

The parties also launched a four-part research series on tokenization. "The crossover continues," writes Sandy Kaul, head of digital assets and innovation at Franklin Templeton, in the wake of the announcement. She points to what's next for tokenized cultural assets as one of the areas the parties are now exploring, with more details expected later this year.

HOME opens up the US mortgage market

The announcement comes just one day after NUVA launched the HOME token, giving investors outside the US access to a managed portfolio of US mortgages from Figure, starting from as little as 1 USDC. The target is an annual return of 7 percent, with no lock-up period, backed by a buffer of around 5 percent of the portfolio's value to absorb losses first. The underlying market is large: US home-equity-backed mortgages stood at 460 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2026, according to US central bank data. The product is not available to investors in the UK, Hong Kong, China, the British Virgin Islands or sanctioned countries.

The road to Wall Street

NUVA started as a partnership between Animoca Brands and Provenance Blockchain Labs (ProvLabs), announced in August 2025, with a marketplace built on Provenance Blockchain as its starting point. In April 2026, NUVA Digital raised 5.2 million dollars in a seed round led by Morgan Creek Digital, and in May that year the platform launched on Ethereum Mainnet — with Provenance Blockchain Labs renamed Nuva Labs and around 19 billion dollars in tokenized assets from Figure attached. Just over a year after launch, Animoca and Nuva Labs are now in talks with one of the world's largest asset managers about the same platform.

Sources: Animoca Brands, CoinDesk, TokenPost, nstartup, Jenny Johnson's LinkedIn profile, Sandy Kaul's LinkedIn profile

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