Black Lake, Nuva Labs tokenize $25M in mortgages on Provenance

Black Lake Digital Markets and Nuva Labs completed the first end-to-end on-chain minting and transfer of $25 million in institutional residential mortgage loans on Provenance Blockchain. The tranche is set to seed a dedicated Black Lake vault on NUVA.finance in the coming month.

Each mortgage loan in the transaction was minted as a non-fungible token on Provenance using Nuva Labs’ infrastructure. Associated loan documents and records are stored in a permissioned DataRoom that restricts access to authorized partners. The loan tokens are pooled and managed through NUVA’s cross-chain vault infrastructure, which allows holders to pledge originated loans as collateral, access on-chain liquidity and retain ownership of the underlying assets.

A patent-pending verification framework is embedded in each loan token. The system uses a policy-hash-locked attestation and a verification toolkit to let investors confirm a loan’s presence, eligibility and origination compliance without exposing borrower-level data. Al Qureshi, Black Lake CEO and co-founder, described the capability this way: “Investors no longer have to take anyone's word for it. They can verify everything, onchain, themselves.”

Anthony Moro, Nuva Labs CEO, noted the scale of the market the arrangement addresses, pointing to more than $13 trillion in outstanding U.S. residential mortgage debt. He added that placing Black Lake’s assets into a dedicated vault provides a more transparent, programmable way to work with mortgage credit: “Bringing Black Lake's assets into a dedicated vault gives the market a more transparent, programmable way to work with real credit.” June Ou, executive director of the Provenance Blockchain Foundation, described the onboarding as “real assets boarding, financing, and trading at institutional scale.”

Under the arrangement, Nuva Labs — previously known as Provenance Blockchain Labs — supplies the software-as-a-service infrastructure to tokenize and manage the loans. Black Lake will serve as the reporting agent and the initial transfer agent. NUVA.finance will handle distribution and connect the tokenized mortgage credit to on-chain liquidity through its vault marketplace. The Black Lake vault will be added to the NUVA vault marketplace next month.

Provenance Blockchain is a Cosmos SDK-based layer 1 focused on financial services. Nuva Labs reported that the network has onboarded more than $23 billion in real-world assets, and the chain already supports prior projects including a home equity loan origination platform and a yield-bearing stablecoin. NUVA’s existing vault products include instruments backed by those assets; the Black Lake vault will be the first on the platform to offer exposure to originated residential mortgage loans.