After more than a decade of building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions and central banks, R3 saw the market begin to bend in a new direction. About a year ago, the firm embarked on a strategic reset, asking a simple but fundamental question: What is the best way for customers to move assets fully up the chain?
Todd MacDonald, R3’s co-founder, said the process coincided with a deep review of the blockchain landscape.
“We talked to essentially all the tier ones and tier twos,” 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 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 set of offchain systems or separate blockchains built on top of Layer 1’s.
The decision, MacDonald said, was based on a 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. R3 came to see Solana as “Blockchain’s Nasdaq,” a venue 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, he said.
Tokenization, the process of representing real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as digital tokens that can be traded on blockchain networks, has emerged as one of the key use cases that is drawing growing interest and investment from traditional financial institutions.
Activity in decentralized finance (DeFi) remains concentrated on a handful of chains, with Ethereum still the largest by 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 growing user engagement.
Recent data shows that Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holds more than $9 billion in TVL, making it one of the best 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 driven significantly higher onchain transaction volume and active wallets, especially for trading and high-frequency applications, although 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 exclusively on one problem: how to tokenize the next trillion dollars of assets and bring them onchain 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 at Solana toward capital formation and capital allocation rather than pure speculation.
Liquidity, MacDonald argued, is the real bottleneck for real-world tokenized assets.
“The beating heart of DeFi is borrowing and lending,” he said. The breakthrough moment will come when a real-world tokenized asset can be treated as credible security on par with native crypto assets. Today, limited liquidity, and in some cases rigid permissions, discourage DeFi investors from engaging meaningfully with these products.
Instead of forcing demand, R3 starts from where onchain appetite already exists. Pointing to boom-and-bust cycles, MacDonald notes that many sophisticated investors are now looking for returns that are more stable and less correlated to the crypto markets.
“We’re trying to bring these assets onchain and package them in a DeFi-native way,” he said, working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The firm’s asset focus reflects this strategy. R3 prioritizes higher yielding products with private credit as a core.
“You need a headline yield to get attention,” MacDonald said, noting that returns around 10% tend to resonate strongly with onchain investors. At the same time, these products must balance returns, liquidity and composition; a challenge as private credit liquidity is often quarterly or “by agreement” in traditional markets.
Beyond private credit, R3 sees significant opportunity in trade finance, where MacDonald said demand and supply are highly elastic.
“If DeFi allocators really leaned into trade finance, the supply from the traditional world is huge,” he explains, pointing to the sheer scale of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque and spans fragmented jurisdictions, bespoke contracts and uneven data standards, making risk hard to price, assets hard to standardize and liquidity slow to scale despite the market’s enormous size.
On the issuer side, R3 already works with well-known investment managers along with a long 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 aim is not only to mirror products from the chain, but to redesign them so that they are investable, tradable and composable on the chain.
Improving liquidity will also require more risk-taking capital deployed directly on the chain. MacDonald said that while there are large native DeFi players today, participation remains narrow.
“We need more diversity of balance sheets willing to put capital to work,” he said, along with more flexible redemption mechanisms that give investors real choice.
That vision underpins R3’s recently announced Corda protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol introduces professionally curated, real-world asset-backed yield boxes that issue floating, redeemable vault tokens. Launching in the first half of 2026, it is designed to give stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-related securities without sacrificing DeFi-like liquidity or compounding.
“Assets accessible through Corda will be supported by protocol-native liquidity layers, enabling instant 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 lending protocols to drive borrowing 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 formulated the effort as a direct response to a growing gap in the market. As DeFi investors move away from purely speculative strategies, the demand for stable, diversified returns uncorrelated with crypto markets is increasing. While hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets are now represented on-chain, most institutional-grade returns still force capital to move off-chain.
“Our goal is to close that gap,” MacDonald said. “Bringing Wall Street quality assets on-chain in a way that finally makes sense for DeFi and bringing on-chain capital to onchain markets at scale.”
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