Collin Sellers did not take a conventional route into finance. Before becoming VP Solutions at Nuva Labs, he was a professional musician, playing guitar and drums, and ran his own lighting design company for live music.
He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in communications and initially worked in entertainment technology. He also opened a food truck in Austin, Texas, with plans to expand it across three cities and five locations.
That business prompted Sellers to enrol in an intensive MBA programme at Acton School of Business. The ten-month course included six months of working between 100 and 110 hours a week. During the programme, however, his interests moved firmly towards finance.
Bitcoin
Sellers had already discovered Bitcoin in 2016.
“I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and decided I liked it there, so I chose to stay,” he says. “I tell people, don’t buy Bitcoin, study Bitcoin, because it will change how you look at the world.”
Studying Bitcoin led him into macroeconomics, capital markets and the movement of money. After completing his MBA, he joined Vertalo, an Austin-based company working in real-world asset tokenisation and digital transfer agency services.
Sellers was part of the early team and spent approximately four years there. The company tokenised its own equity and worked on projects involving racehorses, whiskey barrels and a rare copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the comic book in which Spider-Man first appeared.
IEX – Stock Exchange
He later joined IEX, the stock exchange featured in Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, where he worked as Director of Product Innovation and learned more about how exchanges operate.
“IEX had a sign saying, ‘Build fairer markets,’ and that was a mission I could get behind,” he says.
Sellers also began writing about real-world asset tokenisation, partly out of frustration with inaccurate claims being repeated across the industry. His analysis of a JPMorgan transaction conducted through Project Guardian attracted attention, and he became a featured writer for the Provenance Blockchain Foundation.
That connection eventually brought him to Nuva Labs, where he now helps build the infrastructure connecting traditional financial assets with blockchain and decentralised finance.
How Nuva Labs Is Bringing Real World Assets into DeFi
Nuva Labs began as Provenance Blockchain Labs, a commercial company spun out of the Provenance Blockchain Foundation.
Provenance is a Layer 1 blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK and developed for financial services. It is closely associated with Figure Technologies, the company founded by former SoFi chief executive Mike Cagney.
Figure used the technology to simplify the origination and management of financial products, including home equity lines of credit, known as HELOCs. According to Collin Sellers, the results demonstrated that blockchain could deliver practical improvements in cost, speed and transparency.
“The question was how we could give other companies the same tools to run the Figure playbook,” says Sellers. “There are significant efficiencies in asset origination and asset management, as well as the ability to add liquidity and enable trading.”
The original foundation operated as a non-profit organisation, which made it difficult to align commercial incentives or issue equity. A for-profit company was therefore established as Provenance Blockchain Labs and later renamed Nuva Labs.
Nuva Labs provides the software and infrastructure required to tokenise, manage and distribute real-world assets. In partnership with Animoca Brands, it also co-created NUVA, a chain-agnostic marketplace designed to bring institutional-grade financial products into decentralised finance.
Animoca Brands became involved after identifying strong demand in Asia for transparent tokenised real-world assets. The partnership combines Nuva Labs’ experience in financial infrastructure with Animoca’s investment network, Web3 reach and community-building expertise.
NUVA launched on Ethereum in May 2026, giving users access to products originating within the Provenance ecosystem. Its initial offering includes assets connected to Figure, such as Treasury-linked yield products and tokens backed by home equity lending.
The underlying assets can be examined on-chain, allowing investors to see what sits inside a vault rather than relying solely on an intermediary’s description.
“Every HELOC is represented individually, and you can look at the collateral making up the vaults,” says Sellers. “You do not have to take somebody’s word for it. You can run that analysis yourself.”
The wider ambition is to create a global distribution layer through which regulated financial assets can move between traditional capital markets and DeFi. Those assets can then become transferable, programmable and usable within other blockchain-based financial products.
