Yesterday Bloomberg reported that enterprise blockchain firm R3 has held early talks with representatives of Ava Labs (affiliated with Avalanche), the Solana Foundation and Adhara about a potential minority investment in the firm, joint venture or outright sale. R3’s Corda DLT is one of the most widely used enterprise blockchains. The company declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.
R3 has a high profile list of backers including several systemically important banks. They include HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, ING and Itaü Unibanco who were amongst 40 firms that participated in a $107 million funding round in 2017. The following year it raised an additional $5 million from forex central counterparty CLS. Since then it hasn’t announced a formal funding round, but the company had a hefty windfall estimated at around $240 million in 2019 from XRP crypto tokens.
R3 had an agreement with Ripple to promote Ripple to R3’s banking clients. As payment it received options over XRP tokens. The two firms fell out over the deal but eventually settled. While the size of the settlement was never announced, we estimated the value of the XRP involved was at least $240 million.
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