Black Lake Digital Markets (“Black Lake”) and Nuva Labs announced the successful minting and onchain transfer of $25 million in mortgage loans on Provenance Blockchain, establishing the technical and operational foundation for bringing institutional mortgage credit into NUVA’s real world asset (RWA) vault infrastructure, which will make these assets accessible and deployable in DeFi strategies.
A vault is an onchain, smart-contract-driven protocol that holds tokenized assets and allows users to gain exposure to them through a single, liquid vault token that represents their proportional ownership. Vaults are designed to address the challenges of distribution, liquidity, and governance, making tokenized assets more accessible and usable in DeFi. The Black Lake vault on NUVA will enable mortgage credit holders to unlock onchain liquidity against originated loan assets while retaining ownership and continuing to earn underlying yield.
The transaction marks the firms’ first completed onchain minting and transfer of originated mortgage loans. It establishes a working path for originated mortgage loans to move onchain at institutional scale. Using Nuva Labs’ suite of products, Black Lake covers the entire lifecycle of private credit instruments onchain:
- The loan is minted as an NFT on the Provenance Blockchain.
- All data associated with the loan is added to DataRoom, with strict permission controls that only allow third-party review partners to view the loan tape and attest to its completeness.
- Tokenized loans are then grouped into pools for ease of management and recordkeeping.
- Loans are used as collateral utilizing crosschain vault infrastructure, granting depositors access to private credit yield on an accrual basis, in permissionless and composable form.
- Black Lake manages vault collateral against vault deposit demand.
The firms intend to use this tranche of $25 million, alongside additional mortgage assets, to seed a dedicated Black Lake vault on the NUVA platform. The vault is designed to allow holders of originated mortgage credit to pledge assets as collateral, access onchain liquidity, and retain ownership of the underlying loans.
“This offering is a proof point for where we believe mortgage credit goes next,” said Al Qureshi, CEO and Co-Founder of Black Lake. “Every loan arrives with a policy-hash-locked attestation and a verification toolkit built on trust. With it, an investor can do three things in seconds: confirm that every asset represented in the token is actually in the pool, validate the eligibility rules for any given asset, and prove that each loan was manufactured in full compliance with those rules. All of this happens without ever touching the borrower’s private information. The result is complete confidence that the pool is exactly what it claims to be. Investors no longer have to take anyone’s word for it. They can verify everything, onchain, themselves.”
“Conventional methods of third-party review fall short in traditional finance,” Qureshi continued. “In crypto, these rails need to be enhanced even further. Instead of a sample, we apply our quality control, trust, and verify capability pro rata. The patent-pending framework is a verification and trust layer that resolves to certainty rather than to a sampled opinion.”
The NUVA vault model is designed to support financing against real world credit collateral while allowing asset holders to continue earning yield generated by the underlying assets. Black Lake expects to serve as reporting agent and initial transfer agent for the assets, while Nuva Labs will provide the SaaS infrastructure needed to tokenize and manage the assets, and NUVA will power distribution to connect tokenized credit to onchain liquidity.
“The goal with NUVA has always been to make high-quality real-world credit usable onchain,” said Anthony Moro, CEO at Nuva Labs. “The U.S. residential mortgage market is massive, with more than $13 trillion outstanding, but its antiquated infrastructure makes it difficult to access or finance efficiently. Bringing Black Lake’s assets into a dedicated vault gives the market a more transparent, programmable way to work with real credit.”
“Provenance Blockchain is built to bring true financial assets onchain with the ability to then immediately finance, trade or bilaterally transact in real time. This onboarding by Black Lake is what the network is designed for: real assets boarding, financing, and trading at institutional scale,” said June Ou, Executive Director of Provenance Blockchain Foundation. “We’re proud to serve as the infrastructure making that possible.”
The $25 million in mortgage loans will be placed in a feeder-fund vault on NUVA.finance in the coming month.