[NEWS] Corda-developed R3 considering strategic sale

R3, the developer of enterprise blockchain Corda, is in talks with representatives from Ava Labs, Solana Foundation and Adhara about a minority investment, joint venture or outright sale. Bloomberg reported on the 24th.

Corda, developed by R3, is one of the most widely used enterprise blockchains. R3 has notable backers, including system-critical banks. HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, ING and Itaú Unibanco participated in a $107 million funding round in 2017.

In 2018, R3 raised another $5 million from CLS, a central foreign exchange clearing house. While it has not announced any formal funding rounds since then, it did make an estimated $240 million from Ripple-issued XRP in 2019.

Meanwhile, R3 has announced layoffs in 2023. In the past few months, there have been further team changes with the departure of several senior employees.

Founder and CTO Richard Gendal Brown is now working part-time at the company. "He will continue to serve as a key advisor to the CEO and R3 Steering Committee and continue in his role as president of R3," an R3 spokesperson said in a statement.

Corda is now the most used permissioned blockchain in the institutional sector with over 60 live solutions. These include SIX Digital Exchange, which hosts the Swiss National Bank's wholesale CBDC, Euroclear's D-FMI tokenization platform, and collateral mobility company HQLA.

The collateral firm is backed by BNP Paribas, Deutsche Boerse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, UBS and others.

Corda has made significant early progress in insurance and trade finance, with two major projects in each space.

High-profile projects shut down

Several high-profile Corda projects have closed, according to Bloomberg. Insurance consortium B3i closed in 2022, and The Institute’s insurance blockchain initiative RiskStream pivoted away from Corda after failing to secure a major funding round. Last year, two major trade finance convergence ventures, Marco Polo and Contour, closed.

Despite these developments and the latest reports, R3 continues to work on major new projects. For example, the company was recently selected as one of the key technologies for the Regulated Liability Network (RLN), a tokenization collaboration led by UK Finance that includes major UK banks. RLN is one of many projects that make up a coordinated effort to adopt tokenization in traditional financial markets.

A similar platform, Progmat, is growing steadily by combining cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain with financial know-how to implement a stable platform.

Progmat is working on a number of projects in the area of ​​tokenizing RWA (real-world assets). Currently, real estate is the mainstream, but in the future, projects are also underway to tokenize stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.

Source: Bloomberg
Image: Shutterstock

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