R3 chooses Solana to scale institutional investments in blockchain

For over ten years, R3 has been building infrastructure for exchanges and central banks, but recently the company sharply shifted its focus. The strategic choice to favor Solana will enable it to elevate institutional assets to a level previously thought impossible. Platform selection is not just a technical decision but a response to the global redefinition of financial markets.

About a year ago, R3 conducted a deep strategic review, focusing on one key question: how to most effectively move assets onto the blockchain. “We spoke with all first- and second-tier platforms to understand where institutional capital would migrate,” explained Todd McDonald, co-founder of R3. The result of this analysis was a partnership with the Solana Foundation, announced in May 2025 at the Accelerate conference.

Strategic Turnaround: Why Solana

R3 positions Solana as the “Nasdaq among blockchains” — a specialized platform for high-performance capital markets, not a testing ground for experiments. The company believes that markets will inevitably move on-chain, and Solana has the optimal structure, throughput, and high-speed trading orientation for this scenario.

Currently, SOL is trading at $105.74 with a market capitalization of $59.88B, reflecting growing recognition of the network among institutional investors. Through the Corda platform, R3 already manages assets exceeding $10 billion and collaborates with HSBC, Bank of America, Bank of Italy, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Swiss National Bank, Euroclear, and other global financial market participants.

Liquidity — the True Bottleneck for Tokenized Assets

According to McDonald, liquidity, not tokenization itself, is the main obstacle to the growth of on-chain real asset markets. The process of representing stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments as digital tokens is developing rapidly, but without deep liquidity, these assets remain isolated.

Today, the Solana DeFi ecosystem holds over $9 billion in locked funds (TVL), making it one of the most dynamic platforms outside of Ethereum and its layer-two solutions. Ethereum still leads in total TVL and liquidity depth, but Solana demonstrates exponential growth thanks to microscopic fees, high throughput, and active user engagement. A key moment will come when tokenized real assets are accepted as full collateral alongside native crypto assets.

Private Credit and Trade Finance: Where R3 Sees Opportunities

Instead of artificially stimulating demand, R3 is starting where interest in on-chain assets already exists. The company focuses on two areas to bring the most attractive products for investors onto the blockchain.

The first area is private credit. Yields around 10% typically attract on-chain investors seeking stable income outside the speculative crypto market segment. However, these products must balance yield, liquidity, and composability — a complex task when private credit liquidity in traditional markets is often limited to quarterly periods or requires special permissions.

The second area is trade finance. McDonald notes high elasticity of demand and supply in this segment: “If DeFi participants turn their attention to trade finance, the supply from the traditional financial world will be enormous.” However, opacity, jurisdictional fragmentation, and the lack of unified data standards hinder risk pricing and slow liquidity growth in this large market.

Corda Protocol: How R3 Plans to Achieve On-Chain Yield

To realize its vision, R3 has developed a new protocol based on Solana called Corda. It is a network of professionally curated income vaults backed by real assets, issuing liquid, buyback tokens.

The protocol launch is scheduled for the first half of 2026. It aims to provide stablecoin holders access to tokenized debt instruments, funds, and securities related to reinsurance, without losing liquidity and with DeFi-style composability.

Assets in Corda will be backed by a protocol-level liquidity mechanism, enabling instant exchange of illiquid assets for on-chain investors. This opens the possibility of using assets as collateral. The protocol will be integrated with leading curators and lending protocols to facilitate borrowing and build credit positions.

High early interest is confirmed by the result: Corda has already received over 30,000 pre-registrations, indicating significant market demand for such solutions.

From Speculation to Stable Income

As DeFi investors move away from purely speculative strategies, the need for diversified income uncorrelated with crypto market cycles grows. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in real assets already represented on the blockchain, most institutional-level yields still require capital to be diverted outside the network.

R3 sees its main target audience as investors who want attractive returns while remaining on-chain, without needing to revert to traditional financial instruments. The company’s strategy to bridge this gap involves bringing Wall Street-level assets onto the blockchain in a way that makes sense for DeFi, and simultaneously attracting off-chain capital into on-chain markets at scale.

The success of this initiative will depend not only on Solana’s technical features but also on R3’s ability to continue developing its partner ecosystem, including the world’s largest financial institutions, which already see opportunities in the on-chain transformation of capital markets.