R3 on Solana: The New Way for Institutional Yield on Onchain

After more than a decade dedicated to building blockchain infrastructure for traditional financial institutions, R3 has decided to pivot towards a new direction—the bringing of millions or billions of dollars of institutional capital directly into the onchain ecosystem. Their strategic approach is not just simple tokenization but creating genuine liquidity for real-world assets that will be attractive to sophisticated investors.

In partnership with the Solana Foundation, announced in May 2025 at the Accelerate blockchain conference, the company is focused on developing institutional-grade yield products specifically designed for the onchain market. “We believe Solana is the best network for that future,” said Todd McDonald, co-founder of R3, citing the network’s speed, high throughput, and trading-first architecture.

Corda Protocol: The Institutional-Grade Approach to DeFi Yield

The centerpiece of R3’s new strategy is the Corda Protocol, set to launch in the first half of 2026. It is not just a simple tokenization tool—it is a sophisticated yield platform designed to provide institutional-quality asset exposure within the DeFi ecosystem, featuring DeFi-style composability and liquidity.

Corda will deliver professionally curated, real-world-asset-backed yield vaults that issue liquid and redeemable tokens. These products will initially provide access to tokenized debt instruments, funds, and reinsurance-linked securities. As proof of strong early demand, Corda has already received over 30,000 pre-registrations within just a few weeks of the announcement.

The protocol will include a built-in liquidity layer that enables investors to exchange from illiquid or limited-liquidity assets into onchain accessible forms. It will also integrate with leading curators and lending protocols to accelerate borrowing and the construction of leveraged positions within the ecosystem.

Liquidity: The Real Challenge, Not Tokenization

While many experts focus on the technical aspects of tokenization, R3 recognizes a more fundamental problem: the lack of real market liquidity for tokenized real-world assets.

“The heart of DeFi is borrowing and lending,” explained McDonald. Without sufficient liquidity, even world-class tokenized assets cannot function effectively as collateral in DeFi. This bottleneck limits the participation of traditional investors seeking yield opportunities on-chain.

Liquidity, not technology itself, remains the key determinant of whether tokenized assets will reach mainstream adoption. Billions of dollars currently represent onchain assets, but most institutional-grade yield still forces capital off the blockchain to seek stable, consistent returns.

Trade Finance and Private Credit: Where the Biggest Opportunities Are

R3 has targeted two specific asset classes highly attractive for institutional yield seeking—private credit and trade finance.

In private credit, the appeal is straightforward: consistent yields of around 10% or higher will strongly convert DeFi investors who are currently shifting from purely speculative strategies. The private credit market has a proven track record in traditional finance and features natural seasonal redemption cycles that can be calibrated for the DeFi marketplace.

Trade finance offers even greater potential. “If onchain allocators truly rely on trade finance, the supply from the traditional world is enormous,” said McDonald. The global trade finance market is in the trillions of dollars, but it is historically complex, fragmented across jurisdictions, and involves customized contracts that are hard to standardize. Blockchain and tokenization offer solutions to these friction points, opening up a vast market for sustainable, recurring yields.

The Strategic Choice of Solana: Why Not Ethereum or Others?

In its strategic evaluation process, R3 consulted nearly all leading blockchain networks—Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains. The decision to go with Solana was based on its structural advantages for institutional capital markets.

While Ethereum remains dominant in TVL and ecosystem maturity, Solana has emerged as the fastest-growing DeFi platform due to its sub-cent transaction costs, sub-second confirmation times, and high-throughput capacity. The Solana DeFi ecosystem has surpassed $9 billion in TVL, making it one of the top networks outside of Ethereum and major Layer 2 rollups.

More importantly, Solana’s design is optimized for high-performance capital markets operations—it is “the Nasdaq of blockchain,” as described by R3. For institutional-grade operations requiring throughput, speed, and predictable execution, Solana offers an unparalleled advantage.

Ecosystem Challenge: Building Sufficient Capital and Participant Diversity

Although many billion-dollar native DeFi players exist, R3 recognizes that participation in DeFi remains niche. To reach the trillion-dollar scale targeted by institutional tokenization, significantly more capital deployment from diversified balance sheets is needed—traditional asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, and other institutional allocators willing to deploy capital directly on-chain.

There is also a need for more flexible redemption mechanics. Liquidity in traditional private credit markets is typically quarterly or “by appointment”—not compatible with real-time DeFi mechanics. New mechanics are required to serve both institutional needs for liquidity management and active trading demands on-chain.

This is where the new iteration of Corda comes in—it will not only bring assets onto the chain but also redesign products to be truly attractive to existing on-chain allocators and gradually appealing to traditional investors.

The Goal: The Trillion-Dollar Transfer

Since the May 2025 pivot, the focus has been laser-sharp: how to tokenize and deliver the next trillion dollars of global assets on-chain in a way that is truly valuable for investors.

It’s not just about issuing tokens. It’s about product redesign—taking sophisticated investment products from Wall Street, adapting them to native DeFi architecture, and structuring them to be both yield-generating and composable within the DeFi ecosystem.

“Our goal is to fill that gap,” said McDonald. “To bring Wall Street-quality assets on-chain in a way that finally makes sense for DeFi, and to bring chain-based capital into the onchain market at scale.”

Through strategic partnership with Solana, R3’s institutional yield infrastructure development, and targeted focus on private credit and trade finance, the path toward trillion-dollar institutional capital inflow is beginning to materialize.