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 McDonald, 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, McDonald 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 billion in 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.