coindesk.com
After more than a decade building infrastructure for exchanges, financial institutions and central banks, R3 saw the market starting to bend in a new direction. About a year ago, the firm initiated a strategic reset, asking a simple but fundamental question: what is the best way for customers to move assets fully onchain?
Todd MacDonald, R3’s co-founder, said that process coincided with a deep review of the blockchain landscape.
“We spoke to essentially all the layer ones and layer 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, announced last May at the blockchain's Accelerate conference, he said.
A layer 1 network is the base layer, or the underlying infrastructure of a blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a set of offchain systems or separate blockchains built on top of layer 1s.
The decision, MacDonald said, was grounded in a long-term conviction that all markets will ultimately 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 see Solana as “the Nasdaq of blockchains,” 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, 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 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, benefitting from high throughput, ultra-low fees and rapidly expanding user engagement.
Recent data shows Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holding more than $9 billionin TVL, making it one of the top networks outside 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, even as Ethereum retains overall TVL dominance and the largest share of institutional assets.
Since that pivot last May, R3 has spent the past eight to nine months almost entirely focused 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 on Solana toward 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 borrow and lend,” he said. The breakthrough moment will come when a tokenized real-world asset can be treated as credible collateral on equal footing with native crypto assets. Today, limited liquidity, and in some cases rigid permissioning, discourages DeFi investors from engaging meaningfully with these products.
Rather than forcing demand, R3 is starting from where onchain appetite already exists. MacDonald pointed to boom-and-bust cycles and notes that many sophisticated investors are now looking for yield that is more stable and less correlated to crypto markets.
“We’re trying to bring these assets onchain and package them in a DeFi-native way,” he said, while working closely with existing allocators to improve access.
The firm’s asset focus reflects that strategy. R3 is prioritizing higher-yielding products, with private credit as a core pillar.
“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 return, 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 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 enormous,” he explains, pointing to the sheer scale of the market and the potential for sustainable returns.
Trade finance is notoriously opaque, spanning fragmented jurisdictions, bespoke contracts and uneven data standards, which makes risk difficult to price, assets hard 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, alongside a longer tail of asset owners, from factories to shipping firms, who see 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 they are investable, tradable and composable onchain.
Improving liquidity will also require more risk capital deployed directly onchain. 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, alongside more flexible redemption mechanisms that give investors genuine choice.
That vision underpins R3’s newly announced Corda Protocol. Built natively on Solana, the protocol introduces professionally curated, real-world-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-style liquidity or composability.
"Assets available through Corda will be supported by protocol-native liquidity layer, 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 power borrowing and levered position building," MacDonald said.
In a sign of strong early 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 is rising for stable, diversified yield that is uncorrelated with crypto markets. While hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets are now represented onchain, most institutional-grade yield still forces 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 off chain capital into onchain markets at scale.”
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