Franklin Templeton and Animoca Plan Broader Asset Lineup for NUVA

Franklin Templeton and Animoca Brands have announced a collaboration to bring tokenized real-world assets from a broader group of issuers to NUVA, extending the vault marketplace beyond its existing Provenance blockchain-based offerings.

The announcement, dated Oct. 9, targets institutional access through NUVA, the Animoca Brands-backed vault marketplace that Animoca co-incubated with Nuva Labs. It does not identify the investments to be added or set a date for their availability.

“The next phase is about expanding how those assets can be accessed, utilized and integrated into increasingly digital investment ecosystems,” said Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of digital assets and innovation, in the statement posted by the asset manager.

Beyond NUVA’s Initial Vaults

NUVA, whose development The Defiant covered in August 2025, launched on Ethereum in May 2026. Its initial offerings included nvYLDS, a vault holding YLDS, an instrument backed by short-dated Treasuries and bank deposits, and nvPRIME, backed by PRIME tokens providing exposure to Figure’s home-equity lines of credit.

That structure already brought Provenance-based assets into Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. The new collaboration aims to broaden the sources of those underlying investments.

According to NUVA’s documentation, users deposit assets such as USDC and receive vault tokens representing a proportional share of the vault. These use Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, allowing them to be deployed in DeFi strategies. The vault holds the underlying tokenized assets, while investors hold the vault tokens.

The firms have also launched a joint research series on institutional tokenization. They said they will explore co-designing and tokenizing real-world cultural assets, with further details expected later in 2026.