R3 is repositioning its business around tokenization and onchain capital markets, selecting Solana as its strategic base. The firm targets high-yield institutional assets like private credit and trade finance, packaged in DeFi-native structures, and argues that liquidity—not tokenization—is the next unlock for real-world assets onchain. About a year ago, it began a strategic reset, culminating in a partnership with the Solana Foundation announced at the Accelerate conference last May. MacDonald said Solana is the best network for that future, highlighting its structure, throughput, and trading-first design, and he described Solana as the Nasdaq of blockchains 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. Tokenization—the process of representing real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as digital tokens tradable on blockchain networks—has emerged as a key use case attracting growing interest from traditional financial institutions, while Solana’s DeFi ecosystem holds more than $9 billion in TVL and has grown rapidly outside Ethereum and its Layer 2s. Since the pivot last May, R3 has spent eight to nine months focused on how to tokenize the next trillion dollars of assets and bring them onchain in a way that works for investors, designing products that existing onchain allocators want to use and that traditional investors can grow into over time. MacDonald says liquidity is the real bottleneck for tokenized real-world assets.
“The beating heart of DeFi is borrow and lend,” he said, and he warned that 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 rigid permissioning dampen DeFi engagement, so 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, adding that they’re trying to bring these assets onchain and package them in a DeFi-native way while collaborating with allocators to improve access. That vision underpins R3’s Corda Protocol, built natively on Solana, which introduces professionally curated, real-world-asset-backed yield vaults that issue liquid, redeemable vault tokens. Launching in the first half of 2026, the vaults aim to give stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds and reinsurance-linked securities without sacrificing DeFi-style liquidity or composability. In a sign of strong early demand, Corda has received more than 30,000 pre-registrations to date.
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