Animoca Brands has secured a heavyweight partner for its tokenized asset ambitions. On October 8, 2026, the company and Franklin Templeton announced a strategic partnership to expand institutional access to tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) through NUVA, a vault marketplace built by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs. Tokenization in this context means representing traditional financial products as blockchain-based tokens so they can be held and transferred with on-chain infrastructure.

Bringing in a firm that manages approximately $1.8 trillion in assets signals that NUVA is aiming beyond crypto-native users. It also lands amid growing overlap between traditional asset management and on-chain infrastructure — a convergence the partnership's own research series will examine directly.

What the Partnership Covers

The core goal is to broaden what NUVA offers. Specifically, the two companies intend to introduce a wider range of assets beyond the Provenance Blockchain, where assets recorded more than $30 billion in total value locked (TVL) as of late September 2026.

The partnership also plans to explore tokenizing cultural assets. In addition, Animoca Brands and Franklin Templeton will co-author a four-part research series examining how traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi) are converging.

How NUVA Works

NUVA went live on Ethereum Mainnet on May 13, 2026. The platform is non-custodial, which means users keep control of their assets rather than handing them to an intermediary.

Its vault tokens follow the ERC-20 standard, the common format for fungible tokens on Ethereum. That design choice matters because ERC-20 tokens can plug into other DeFi applications with little friction. The platform is also designed for multichain distribution of RWAs, meaning tokenized products would not be confined to a single network.

The first vaults lean on established financial products. These include Figure Technologies' YLDS, an SEC-registered stablecoin that pays yield, along with home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). NUVA offers permissionless access to eligible investors, and certain products carry no lockup periods. The permissionless label comes with a caveat: access is still gated to eligible investors, a structure that reflects the compliance screening traditional firms typically require.

Why Franklin Templeton Fits

Franklin Templeton is not new to tokenization. The firm has prior on-chain experience through its BENJI platform and the OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. That track record means the partnership pairs a crypto-native vault marketplace with a traditional manager that has already navigated running fund products on-chain — experience relevant to the compliance demands of the assets NUVA plans to add.

What It Means for Tokenized Assets

The Provenance base of over $ billion in TVL gives the platform a meaningful foundation, although the partnership has not disclosed specific asset additions or timelines. The concrete markers to watch are which assets beyond Provenance are introduced, how the cultural-asset exploration develops, and how the four-part research series unfolds.

The inclusion of an SEC-registered stablecoin like YLDS is worth noting. Products with a clear regulatory footprint tend to be easier for compliance teams to approve, which can lower the barrier for traditional firms entering on-chain markets.

At the same time, non-custodial, permissionless platforms shift more responsibility onto users. Composability also means a vault token can end up inside other protocols that carry their own smart contract and liquidity risks, while multichain distribution adds another layer of complexity.