Corda’s R3 Platform Shifts to Public Blockchains through Solana Partnership

R3 Cord, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, today announced a strategic partnership with Solana Foundation, to link its permissioned blockchain with Solana’s permissionless blockchain platform.

R3 Cord is a permissioned Blockchain and DLT platform designed specifically to serve the needs of financial companies. Its permissioned blockchain is quite different from other public blockchains.

R3 operates a permissioned blockchain environment that makes sure that transactions are only visible to approved entities, which is crucial for financial companies. Besides that, R3 enables tokenization of varied assets, allowing their representation as virtual tokens on its blockchain.

Why R3 embracing public blockchains

Today’s R3’s collaboration with Solana Foundation is a great milestone for the permissioned DLT platform. This partnership is designed to enable it to build a business-grade protocol service on top of Solana’s permissionless (public) layer-1 blockchain network. The development of this business-grade protocol service on the Solana blockchain is prepared to allow compliant financial companies to access the public blockchain infrastructure (the protocol service) while maintaining compliance standards for the tokenization of RWAs (real-world assets).

The protocol service operating on top of Solana is set to allow native interpretability between Solana and R3’s existing DLT platform. This integration will help bridge the gap between R3’s permissioned network and public blockchain ecosystems. This arrangement is quite different from traditional interoperability methods as it will allow direct confirmations of R3’s private Corda transactions on Solana’s blockchain.

Also, through this partnership, R3 will integrate its network of compliant tokens on-chain across the new protocol service linked to Solana’s blockchain. This protocol will help offer new liquidity and settlement alternatives to traditional financial firms and R3’s $10 billion valued on-chain assets.

This integration is further set to connect institutional Traditional finance (TradFi) with decentralized finance (DeFi), enabling R3 to tap into the traditional finance ecosystems with the capability, liquidity, and advancements of digital asset markets.

Strategic timing

This collaboration happens following R3’s recent move to explore strategic alternatives, including a potential sale, investment, or joint sale. In October last year, R3 held negotiations with officials from Adhara, the Solana Foundation, and Ava Labs regarding a potential joint venture, minority investment, or complete sale.

Today’s partnership between R3 and the Solana Foundation led to the appointment of Lily Lui, Solana Foundation President, to be part of R3’s board of directors, a move that signals a greater strategic collaboration between the two firms.

Since there are no reports about a Solana investment in R3, Liu’s appointment signifies a more profound partnership than an ordinary technology collaboration.