After more than a decade of building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions and central banks, R3 saw the market beginning to bend in a new direction. About a year ago, the company initiated 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 this process coincided with an in-depth review of the blockchain landscape.
“We’ve spoken to virtually all layers and layers two,” he explained in an interview with CoinDesk, as R3 evaluated where institutional capital markets were most likely to migrate. That work culminated in a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation, which was announced last May at the blockchain’s Accelerate conference, he said.
A layer 1 network is the base layer or underlying infrastructure of a blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a series of offchain 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 onchain markets.
“We think Solana is the best network for that future,” he said, pointing to its structure, throughput and trading-first design. R3 came to think of Solana as “the Nasdaq of blockchains,” a venue purpose-built for robust capital markets rather than general experimentation.
Through its Corda blockchain platform, R3 supports more than $10 billion in assets and partners with participants including HSBC, Bank of America, the Bank of Italy, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Swiss National Bank, Euroclear, SDX and SBI, he said.
Tokenization, the process of representing real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as digital tokens tradable on blockchain networks, has emerged as one of the key use cases that is increasingly attracting interest and investment from traditional financial institutions.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) activity remains concentrated on a handful of chains, with Ethereum still the largest by total value (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 growing user engagement.
Recent data shows that Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holds over $9 billion in TVL, making it one of the top networks outside of Ethereum and its Layer 2s, and in some periods rivaling the combined DeFi activity of major Ethereum L2s.
Solana’s model has led to a significantly increased number of on-chain transactions and active wallets, especially for trading and high-frequency applications, even as Ethereum retains overall TVL dominance and the bulk of institutional assets.
Since that pivot last May, R3 has spent the last eight to nine months focusing almost entirely on one problem: how to tokenize the next trillion dollars of assets and bring them on-chain in a way that actually works for investors. That means not just issuing tokens, but designing products that existing onchain allocators want to use, and that traditional investors can grow into over time.
MacDonald said R3 is already seeing a shift in focus on Solana towards capital formation and capital allocation, rather than pure speculation.
Liquidity, MacDonald argued, is the real bottleneck for tokenized real-world assets.
“The beating heart of DeFi is lending and borrowing,” he said. The breakthrough moment will come when a tokenized real-world asset can be treated as credible collateral on par with native crypto assets. Today, limited liquidity, and in some cases rigid permission, discourages DeFi investors from meaningfully engaging with these products.
Instead of forcing demand, R3 starts from where the onchain appetite already exists. MacDonald pointed to boom-and-bust cycles, noting that many sophisticated investors are now looking for returns that are more stable and less correlated with crypto markets.
“We’re trying to bring these assets on-chain and package them in a DeFi-native way,” he said, working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The company’s asset focus reflects that strategy. R3 gives priority to products with higher returns, with private credit as a core pillar.
“You need a yield to attract attention,” MacDonald said, noting that yields around 10% tend to resonate strongly with onchain investors. At the same time, these products must offer a balance between return, liquidity and composability; a challenge given that private credit liquidity in traditional markets is often quarterly or “by appointment.”
In addition to private credit, R3 sees significant opportunities in trade finance, with MacDonald saying supply and demand are highly elastic.
“If DeFi allocators were to really focus on trade finance, the offering from the traditional world is enormous,” he explains, noting the sheer size of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque and involves fragmented jurisdictions, bespoke contracts and uneven data standards, making risk difficult to price, assets difficult to standardize and liquidity slow to scale despite the market’s enormous size.
On the issuer side, R3 is already working with household name investment managers, in addition to a longer tail of asset owners, from factories to shipping companies, who see tokenization as a new distribution channel and model for capital formation. The goal is not just to mirror products outside the chain, but to redesign them so that they can be invested, traded and assembled in the chain.
Improving liquidity will also require more risk capital to be deployed directly in the chain. MacDonald said that while there are large native DeFi players today, participation remains limited.
“We need more diversity of balance sheets that are willing to put capital to work,” he said, along with more flexible repayment mechanisms that give investors real choice.
That vision underlies R3’s recently announced Corda Protocol. Originally built on Solana, the protocol introduces professionally curated, asset-backed yield vaults that issue liquid, redeemable vault tokens. Launching in the first half of 2026, the vaults are designed to give stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-linked securities without sacrificing DeFi liquidity or composability.
“Assets available through Corda will be backed by a protocol-native liquidity layer, enabling direct swaps out of otherwise illiquid or liquidity-constrained assets for onchain investors. This unlocks the use of the assets as collateral at scale. The protocol will be integrated with top curators and credit protocols to enable lending and leveraged position building,” MacDonald said.
In a sign of strong early demand, Corda has received more than 30,000 pre-registrations to date.
He described the effort as a direct response to a growing gap in the market. As DeFi investors move away from purely speculative strategies, demand for stable, diversified returns that are uncorrelated with crypto markets is increasing. While hundreds of billions of dollars in real assets are now represented on-chain, the bulk of returns at the institutional level still force capital to move off-chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” MacDonald said. “To bring Wall Street-quality assets onchain in a way that finally makes sense for DeFi, and to bring onchain capital to onchain markets at scale.”
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