Black Lake, Nuva Labs tokenize $25 million in mortgage loans on Provenance in RWA push

Black Lake Digital Markets and Nuva Labs have completed what both firms are calling the first onchain minting and transfer of $25 million in institutional mortgage loans on Provenance Blockchain, establishing the technical and operational groundwork for bringing originated mortgage credit into decentralized finance.

The transaction, announced exclusively to The Block on Wednesday, is the firm's first end-to-end onchain completion of originated mortgage loans, intended to establish a path for those assets to move onchain at an institutional scale. The $25 million tranche is expected to seed a dedicated Black Lake vault on NUVA.finance in the coming month.

The system

Under the structure, each mortgage loan is minted as a non-fungible token on Provenance Blockchain using Nuva Labs' infrastructure, with all associated loan data housed in a permissioned "DataRoom" that restricts third-party review to authorized partners.

Tokenized loans are then pooled for management and deployed as collateral via NUVA's cross-chain vault infrastructure, giving depositors access to private credit yield in a permissionless, composable form.

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 throughout.

Verification framework

Central to the transaction is a patent-pending verification framework.

According to Al Qureshi, CEO and co-founder of Black Lake, the model embeds a policy-hash-locked attestation and a verification toolkit for every loan token. Qureshi explained that it’s designed to let investors confirm that each loan in the pool is present, meets eligibility criteria, and was originated in compliance with those rules, without accessing borrower data.

"Investors no longer have to take anyone's word for it. They can verify everything, onchain, themselves," Qureshi said.

Qureshi positioned the model as a direct response to the opacity that has historically plagued mortgage credit review. Rather than reviewing a sample, as conventional third-party due diligence typically requires, the framework applies quality control pro rata across every loan in the pool.

Addressing collateral inefficiencies

Anthony Moro, CEO of Nuva Labs, pointed to the scale of the problem the transaction is designed to address. The U.S. residential mortgage market carries more than $13 trillion in outstanding debt, but its infrastructure has made mortgage assets difficult to access or finance efficiently — a gap the dedicated vault is meant to address.

"Bringing Black Lake's assets into a dedicated vault gives the market a more transparent, programmable way to work with real credit," Moro said.

Nuva Labs — formerly Provenance Blockchain Labs, and the leading developer and integration partner on Provenance — will provide the SaaS infrastructure to tokenize and manage the assets.

Black Lake will serve as the reporting agent and initial transfer agent. NUVA.finance will power distribution, connecting tokenized mortgage credit to onchain liquidity, the team told The Block.

June Ou, executive director of the Provenance Blockchain Foundation, called the onboarding a direct illustration of what the network was built to handle. "Real assets boarding, financing, and trading at institutional scale," Ou said.

Provenance Blockchain, a Cosmos SDK-based Layer 1 purpose-built for financial services, has onboarded more than $23 billion in real-world assets, according to Nuva Labs. The Block's data shows over $19 billion in RWA market domiciled on Provenance as of June 24.

The NUVA vault marketplace currently offers two existing products: nvYLDS, a vault backed by the YLDS instrument, and nvPRIME, backed by Figure's pool of onchain prime home equity lines of credit.

The Black Lake vault will be the first on NUVA to offer exposure to originated residential mortgage loans.