After more than a decade building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions and central banks, R3 saw the market starting to move in a new direction. About a year ago, the company launched a strategic reset, asking a simple but fundamental question: What is the best way for customers to fully move their assets on-chain?
R3 co-founder Todd MacDonald said the process coincides with an in-depth review of the blockchain landscape.
“We basically talked to all the first and second tiers,” he explained in an interview with CoinDesk, as R3 assessed where institutional capital markets were most likely to move. That work eventually led to a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation, which was announced at the Blockchain Acceleration Conference last May, he said.
The first layer of network is the base layer, or the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a set of off-chain systems or individual blockchains built on top of Layer 1.
McDonald said the decision was based on a long-term belief that all markets will eventually become on-chain markets.
“We think Solana is the best network of the future,” he said, pointing to its structure, throughput and transaction-first design. R3 sees Solana as the “Nasdaq of blockchain,” a place purpose-built for high-performance capital markets rather than general experimentation.
He said that through its Corda blockchain platform, R3 supports more than $10 billion in assets and works with players 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 digital tokens that can be traded on blockchain networks, has become one of the key use cases attracting growing interest and investment from traditional financial institutions.
Activity in decentralized finance (DeFi) remains concentrated on a handful of chains, with Ethereum remaining the chain with the largest total value locked (TVL), reflecting its deep liquidity, broad developer ecosystem and institutional adoption. However, Solana has become one of the fastest growing DeFi platforms thanks to high throughput, ultra-low fees, and rapidly expanding user participation.
Latest data shows Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holds over $9 billion TVL makes it one of the top networks outside of Ethereum and its Layer 2, and has rivaled major Ethereum L2’s overall DeFi activity in some periods.
Solana’s model has significantly increased on-chain transaction volume and active wallets, especially in trading and high-frequency applications, although Ethereum still maintains overall TVL dominance and the largest share of institutional assets.
Since its transformation last May, R3 has spent the past eight to nine months focusing almost entirely on one problem: how to tokenize the next trillion-dollar assets and bring them on-chain in a way that is truly investor-friendly. This means not just issuing tokens, but designing products that existing on-chain allocators want to use and that traditional investors can grow into over time.
MacDonald said R3 has seen Solana’s focus shift toward capital formation and capital allocation rather than pure speculation.
McDonald believes that liquidity is the real bottleneck in tokenizing real-world assets.
“Lending is at the core of DeFi,” he said. The breakthrough moment will come when tokenized real-world assets can be treated as trusted collateral on an equal footing with native crypto assets. Today, limited liquidity and, in some cases, strict licensing prevent DeFi investors from meaningfully participating in these products.
Rather than forcing demand, R3 starts from where demand already exists in the chain. McDonald pointed to boom and bust cycles, noting that many sophisticated investors are now looking for yields that are more stable and less correlated with the crypto market.
“We’re trying to put these assets on-chain and package them in a way that’s native to DeFi,” he said, while working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The company’s asset focus reflects this strategy. R3 prioritizes high-yield products, with private credit as its core pillar.
“You need an overall rate of return to get attention,” MacDonald said, noting that returns of around 10% tend to resonate strongly with on-chain investors. At the same time, these products must balance returns, liquidity and composability; this is a challenge given that private credit liquidity typically occurs on a quarterly or “appointment” basis in traditional markets.
In addition to private credit, R3 also sees huge opportunities in trade finance, where McDonald says both demand and supply are highly elastic.
“If DeFi allocators are really leaning into trade finance, the supply from the traditional world is huge,” he explained, citing the sheer 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 risks, difficult to standardize assets and slow to expand liquidity despite the size of the market.
On the issuer side, R3 is already working with household name investment managers and long-tail asset owners from factories to shipping companies who view tokenization as a new distribution channel and a new model for capital formation. The aim is not just to mirror off-chain products, but to redesign them so that they are investable, tradable and composable on-chain.
Improving liquidity also requires more risk capital deployed directly on-chain. MacDonald said that although there are a large number of local DeFi players today, participation is still narrow.
“We need more diverse balance sheets that are willing to put capital to work,” he said, as well as more flexible redemption mechanisms that give investors real choice.
This vision is the foundation of R3’s newly released Corda protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol introduces a professionally curated yield vault backed by real-world assets that issues liquid, redeemable vault tokens. Set to launch in the first half of 2026, these vaults are designed to give stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-related securities without sacrificing DeFi-style liquidity or composability.
MacDonald said: “Assets offered through Corda will be backed by the protocol’s native liquidity layer, enabling instant exchange of otherwise illiquid or liquidity-constrained assets for on-chain investors. This enables the use of assets as collateral at scale. The protocol will be integrated with top-tier curators and lending protocols to power lending and leveraged position building.”
Corda has received over 30,000 pre-registrations to date, indicating strong early demand.
He sees the effort as a direct response to a growing gap in the market. As DeFi investors move away from purely speculative strategies, the need for stable, diversified returns uncorrelated to crypto markets is rising. Even though there are now hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets represented on-chain, most institutional-grade yields still force capital to move off-chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” McDonald said. “Bringing high-quality Wall Street assets onto the chain in a way that ultimately makes sense for DeFi, and bringing off-chain capital into the on-chain market on a large scale.”
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