After more than a decade of building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions, and central banks, R3 has seen the market begin to bend in a new direction. About a year ago, the company began a strategic reset, asking a simple but fundamental question: What is the best way for customers to move their assets fully on-chain?
R3 co-founder Todd McDonald said the process coincided with a thorough review of the blockchain landscape.
“We basically talked to all Layer 1s and Layer 2s,” he explained in an interview with CoinDesk, as R3 assessed where institutional capital markets are most likely to move. That effort culminated in a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation, which was announced at the Blockchain Accelerate conference last May, he said.
The Layer 1 network is the base layer, or the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a set of off-chain systems, or separate blockchains built on top of Layer 1.
McDonald said the decision was based on a long-term belief that eventually all markets will become on-chain markets.
“We think Solana is the best network for that future,” he said, pointing to its structure, throughput, and transaction-first design. R3 has come to view Solana as the “Nasdaq of blockchain,” a venue purpose-built for high-performance capital markets rather than general experimentation.
He said R3 supports over $10 billion in assets through its Corda blockchain platform and works with participants such as HSBC, Bank of America, Bank of Italy, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Swiss National Bank, Euroclear, SDX, and SBI.
Tokenization, the process of representing real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as tradable digital tokens on blockchain networks, has emerged as one of the leading use cases attracting increasing interest and investment from traditional financial institutions.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) activity remains concentrated in a small number of chains, with Ethereum remaining the largest in Total Value Locked (TVL), reflecting its deep liquidity, broad developer ecosystem, and institutional adoption. However, Solana has emerged as one of the fastest growing DeFi platforms, benefiting from high throughput, ultra-low fees, and rapidly expanding user engagement.
According to recent data, Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holds over $9 billion in TVL, making it one of the top networks outside of Ethereum and its Layer 2, and in some periods rivaling the total DeFi activity of the leading Ethereum L2.
Even though Ethereum maintains overall TVL dominance and the largest share of institutional assets, Solana’s model has driven significantly increased on-chain transaction volumes and active wallets, especially in trading and high-frequency applications.
Since the change in direction last May, R3 has focused almost entirely on one issue over the past eight to nine months. It’s a question of how to tokenize the next trillions of dollars of assets and bring them on-chain in a way that actually works for investors. This means not just issuing tokens, but designing a product that existing on-chain allocators will want to use and that traditional investors can grow over time.
MacDonald said R3 has already shifted its focus for Solana to capital formation and allocation rather than pure speculation.
McDonald argued that the real bottleneck for tokenized real-world assets is liquidity.
“The heart of DeFi is lending and borrowing,” he says. A breakthrough moment will come when tokenized real-world assets are treated as reliable collateral on par with native crypto assets. Currently, limited liquidity and, in some cases, strict permissions prevent DeFi investors from meaningfully engaging with these products.
Rather than forcing demand, R3 starts where on-chain demand already exists. MacDonald pointed to boom-bust cycles and noted that many sophisticated investors are now seeking yields that are more stable and less correlated to the crypto market.
“We’re bringing these assets on-chain and packaging them in a DeFi-native way,” he said, working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The company’s focus on assets reflects that strategy. R3 focuses on private credit and prioritizes high-yield products.
“You need headline yields to get attention,” McDonald said, noting that returns around 10% tend to resonate with on-chain investors. At the same time, these products must balance revenue, liquidity, and configurability. This is a challenge given that private credit liquidity in traditional markets is often quarterly or “by appointment.”
R3 sees big opportunities in trade finance beyond private credit, and McDonald said supply and demand are highly elastic.
“If DeFi allocators were really leaning into trade finance, the supply from the traditional world would be huge,” he explained, pointing to the huge size of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque, spanning fragmented jurisdictions, bespoke contracts and uneven data standards, making it difficult to price risk, difficult to standardize assets, and slow to expand liquidity despite the market’s huge size.
On the issuer side, R3 is already working with prominent investment management firms and with a long tail of asset owners, from factories to shipping companies, who see tokenization as a new distribution channel and new model for capital formation. The goal is not just to mirror off-chain products, but to redesign them to be investable, tradable, and composable on-chain.
Improving liquidity will also require more risk capital to be deployed directly on-chain. McDonald said that although there are currently large native DeFi players, participation remains narrow.
“We need more balance sheet diversity to leverage capital aggressively,” he said, along with more flexible redemption mechanisms that give investors real choice.
This vision underpins R3’s newly announced Corda protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol introduces a yield vault backed by expertly curated real-world assets that issues liquid, redeemable vault tokens. Launching in the first half of 2026, the vault is designed to allow stablecoin holders to access tokenized debt instruments, funds, and reinsurance-related securities without sacrificing DeFi-style liquidity or composability.
“Assets available through Corda are supported by a protocol-native liquidity layer that enables instant swapping of illiquid or liquidity-constrained assets for on-chain investors. This enables the use of assets as collateral at scale. The protocol integrates with top curator and lending protocols to power position building through borrowing and leverage,” McDonald said.
In a sign of strong early demand, Corda has received more than 30,000 pre-registrations to date.
He framed the initiative as a direct response to growing disparities in the marketplace. As DeFi investors move away from pure speculative strategies, there is a growing demand for stable and diversified yields that are uncorrelated with the crypto market. While hundreds of billions of dollars of real-world assets are now represented on-chain, most institutional yield still moves capital off-chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” McDonald said. “To finally bring Wall Street quality assets on-chain in a way that makes sense for DeFi, and bring off-chain capital to on-chain markets at scale.”
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