After more than a decade building infrastructure for stock exchanges, financial institutions, and central banks, R3 has seen the market begin 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 move their assets entirely on-chain?
Todd MacDonald, co-founder of R3, said this process coincides with an in-depth review of the blockchain landscape.
“We talked to pretty much all layers one and two,” he explained in an interview with CoinDesk, as R3 assessed where institutional capital markets were most likely to migrate. This 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 the long-term belief that all markets will eventually become on-chain markets.
“We believe Solana is the best network for this future,” he said, highlighting its structure, throughput and commerce-focused design. R3 has come to view Solana as “the Nasdaq of blockchains,” a place purpose-built for high-performance capital markets rather than general experimentation.
Through its Corda blockchain platform, R3 supports more than $10 billion in assets and works with participants including 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 leading use cases attracting increasing interest and investment from traditional financial institutions.
Activity in decentralized finance (DeFi) remains concentrated on a handful of chains, with Ethereum remaining the largest in terms of total value locked (TVL), reflecting its deep liquidity, large developer ecosystem, and institutional adoption. However, Solana has become one of the fastest growing DeFi platforms, boasting high throughput, ultra-low fees, and rapidly expanding user engagement.
Recent Data Shows Solana’s DeFi Ecosystem Holds Over $9 Billion in TVL, making it one of the best networks outside of Ethereum and its Layer 2s, and at times rivaling the combined DeFi activity of major Ethereum L2s.
Solana’s model has generated significantly higher on-chain trading volume and active wallets, especially for trading and high-frequency applications, even though 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 almost entirely focused on one problem: how to tokenize the next trillion dollars in assets and bring them online in a way that actually works for investors. This means not only issuing tokens, but also designing products that existing on-chain allocators want to use and that traditional investors can expand into over time.
MacDonald said R3 is already seeing a shift in focus in Solana toward capital formation and allocation, rather than pure speculation.
According to MacDonald, liquidity is the real bottleneck for real-world tokenized assets.
“The beating heart of DeFi is borrowing and lending,” he said. The defining moment will come when a real-world tokenized asset can be treated as credible collateral on an equal footing with native crypto assets. Today, limited liquidity and, in some cases, rigid permissions discourage DeFi investors from meaningfully engaging in these products.
Rather than forcing demand, R3 starts from where the appetite for the channel already exists. MacDonald highlighted boom-bust cycles and noted that many sophisticated investors now seek a more stable return that is less correlated to crypto markets.
“We’re trying to bring these assets on-chain and aggregate them in a DeFi-native way,” he said, while working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The company’s asset orientation reflects this strategy. R3 prioritizes higher yielding products, with private credit as a central pillar.
“You need an overall return to attract attention,” MacDonald said, noting that returns around 10% tend to resonate strongly with on-chain investors. At the same time, these products must balance yield, liquidity and composability; a challenge given that private credit liquidity is often quarterly or “by appointment” in traditional markets.
Beyond private credit, R3 sees significant opportunities in trade finance, where MacDonald said demand and supply are very elastic.
“If DeFi allocators really looked at trade finance, the supply from the traditional world would be huge,” he explains, highlighting the scale of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque, spanning fragmented jurisdictions, bespoke contracts and uneven data standards, making risk difficult to assess, assets difficult to standardize and liquidity slow to increase despite the enormous size of the market.
On the issuer side, R3 is already working with renowned investment managers, alongside a wider range of asset owners, from factories to shipping companies, who view tokenization as a new distribution channel and capital formation model. The goal is not just to mirror products off-chain, but to redesign them so that they are investable, tradable, and composable on-chain.
Improving liquidity will also require more venture capital deployed directly on-chain. MacDonald said that while there are large native DeFi players today, participation remains small.
“We need a greater diversity of balance sheets ready to grow capital,” he said, as well as more flexible buyback mechanisms that give real choice to investors.
This vision underpins R3’s recently announced Corda protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol introduces professionally curated, real-world asset-backed yield vaults that issue liquid, tradable vault tokens. Launching in the first half of 2026, the vaults are designed to allow stablecoin holders to access tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-linked securities, without sacrificing liquidity or DeFi-style composability.
“Assets available through Corda will be supported by a native liquidity layer of the protocol, enabling instant trades of otherwise illiquid or limited liquidity assets for on-chain investors.
A sign of strong initial demand, Corda has received more than 30,000 pre-registrations to date.
He presented 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 and diversified returns, uncorrelated to crypto markets. While hundreds of billions of dollars of real assets are now represented on-chain, most institutional-quality returns still force capital to leave the chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” MacDonald said. “Bringing quality Wall Street assets onto the chain in a way that finally makes sense for DeFi, and attracting on-chain capital to large-scale on-chain markets.” »
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