After more than a decade building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions and central banks, R3 saw the market begin to take 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 assets completely on-chain?
Todd MacDonald, co-founder of R3, said that process coincided with a deep review of the blockchain landscape.
“We talked to essentially all layers one and two,” he explained in an interview with CoinDesk, as R3 assessed where institutional capital markets were most likely to migrate. That work culminated in a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation, announced last May at the Accelerate blockchain conference, he said.
A layer 1 network is the base layer or underlying infrastructure of a blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a set of off-chain systems or separate blockchains built on top of Layer 1.
The decision, MacDonald said, was based on a long-term conviction that all markets will eventually become on-chain markets.
“We believe Solana is the best network for that future,” he said, pointing to its structure, performance and commerce-focused design. R3 came to see Solana as “the Nasdaq of blockchains,” a place built specifically for high-yield capital markets rather than general experimentation.
Through its Corda blockchain platform, R3 supports more than $10 billion in assets and works with participants such as HSBC, Bank of America, Bank of Italy, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Swiss National Bank, Euroclear, SDX and SBI, it said.
Tokenization, the process of representing real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as tradable digital tokens 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 being the largest by 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, benefiting from high performance, ultra-low fees, and rapidly expanding user participation.
Recent data shows that Solana’s DeFi ecosystem is over $9 billion on TVL, making it one of the leading networks outside of Ethereum and its Layer 2s, and in some periods rivals the combined DeFi activity of Ethereum’s major L2s.
Solana’s model has driven significantly higher on-chain transaction volumes and active wallets, especially for high-frequency and trading applications, even as Ethereum retains overall TVL dominance and the largest share of institutional assets.
Since that pivot last May, R3 has spent the last eight to nine months focused almost entirely on one problem: how to tokenize the next $1 trillion in assets and put them on-chain in a way that actually works for investors. That means not only issuing tokens, but also designing products that existing on-chain allocators want to use and that traditional investors can develop over time.
MacDonald said R3 is already seeing a shift in focus at Solana toward capital formation and allocation, rather than pure speculation.
Liquidity, MacDonald argued, is the real bottleneck for real-world tokenized assets.
“The heart of DeFi is borrowing and lending,” he said. The decisive moment will come when a real-world tokenized asset can be treated as credible collateral on equal footing with native cryptoassets. Today, limited liquidity and, in some cases, rigid permissions discourage DeFi investors from meaningfully participating in these products.
Instead of forcing demand, R3 is starting from where chain appetite already exists. Pointing to boom and bust cycles, MacDonald notes that many sophisticated investors are now looking for more stable, less correlated performance with crypto markets.
“We are trying to get these assets on-chain and package them in a native DeFi way,” he said, while working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The company’s asset focus reflects that strategy. R3 is prioritizing higher-yield products, with private credit as a fundamental pillar.
“You need an overall return to get attention,” MacDonald said, noting that returns around 10% tend to resonate strongly with on-chain investors. At the same time, these products must balance profitability, liquidity and composability; a challenge given that private credit liquidity is typically quarterly or “by appointment” in traditional markets.
Beyond private credit, R3 sees significant opportunities in trade finance, where MacDonald said supply and demand are very elastic.
“If DeFi allocators really leaned toward trade finance, the supply from the traditional world would be huge,” he explains, pointing to the enormous scale of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque, encompassing fragmented jurisdictions, customized contracts, and uneven data standards, making it difficult to price risk, standardize assets, and scale liquidity despite the enormous size of the market.
On the issuer side, R3 is already working with big-name investment managers, along with a longer tail of asset owners, from factories to shipping companies, who see tokenization as a new distribution channel and a new model for capital formation. The objective is not only to reflect the products outside the chain, but to redesign them so that they are investable, marketable and composable within the chain.
Improving liquidity will also require more risk capital deployed directly on-chain. MacDonald said that while there are large native DeFi players today, participation remains limited.
“We need more diversity of balance sheets willing to put capital to work,” he said, along with more flexible repayment mechanisms that give investors genuine options.
That vision underpins R3’s recently announced Corda protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol features professionally curated real-world asset-backed yield vaults that issue liquid, redeemable vault tokens. The vaults, set to launch in the first half of 2026, are designed to give stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-linked securities, without sacrificing DeFi-style liquidity or composability.
“The assets available through Corda will be backed by a liquidity layer native to the protocol, enabling instant trades of illiquid or liquidity-constrained assets for on-chain investors. This unlocks the use of the assets as collateral at scale. The protocol will integrate with leading curators and lending protocols to drive borrowing and building leveraged positions,” MacDonald said.
In a sign of strong initial demand, Corda has received more than 30,000 pre-registrations to date.
He framed the effort as a direct response to a growing gap in the market. As DeFi investors move away from purely speculative strategies, demand increases for stable, diversified performance that is uncorrelated with crypto markets. While hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets are now represented on-chain, most institutional-grade performance still forces capital off-chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” MacDonald said. “Bringing quality Wall Street assets onto the chain in a way that ultimately makes sense for DeFi, and bringing off-chain capital to on-chain markets at scale.”
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