From Private to Public Blockchains! R3 Corda & Solana Team Up! | Todd McDonald

Todd McDonald (0:00)

Shifting the company from focusing on private blockchains, focusing on things like centering digital currency to where we are today, which is all in on tokenizing the next trillion dollars of assets on open public blockchain rails. That was probably both the biggest challenge and also the thing I'm most proud of.

Tony Edward (0:20)

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Link will be in the description.

Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and we are recording at Station 3 in New York's Financial District. And joining me is Todd McDonald, who's the co-founder of R3, which is a leading provider of RWAs and digital assets on Solana.

Todd, great to have you.

Todd McDonald (3:01)

It's great to be here.

Tony Edward (3:03)

Todd, I'm excited for this conversation because I've covered R3's updates over the years on the podcast and you guys have been at the forefront in building with blockchain tech. You were so early.

Todd McDonald (3:15)

It's been a journey.

Tony Edward (3:16)

I'm so excited to dive into the history and what you're doing now and more. But let's kick it off with your background. Where are you from? How did you make it when to TradFi and then crypto?

Todd McDonald (3:26)

Yeah, so grew up in Connecticut. So about halfway between Boston and New York. Made my way to New York City. I sort of accidentally got a job in finance.

The short version of the story is my sister threw her fiance out of their apartment for over an argument and my father suggested I should ask his father for a job because he wanted to get back at his son and turns out they offer me a job. I was on a trading floor when I was 21 thanks to this guy Oliver being a jerk to my sister. So I have a lot of debt to him and that was 1996-97 back in the Wild West of trading, which was quite fun. A lot of responsibility for a young kid.

I was running P&L and trading books back then. And yeah, I spent about 15 years and spent a lot of time in emerging markets. So that was, I worked at standard charter banks, so it was very much in the emerging market world. So high volatility on the FX side, things moved around every day. It wasn't exactly 24-7 markets. It was basically, it would open Sunday afternoon and trade until 5 p.m. on Friday. So as you can imagine, once I stumbled upon Bitcoin around 2013 or so, it was like the FX markets on steroids. And it was love at first sight, I guess, after that.