The New York-based blockchain consortium R3 intends to attract up to $200 million of investments from its 42 members. In exchange for received funds, R3 plans to offer shares of a new fintech company.

The negotiations between R3 and its financial partners have already begun although the process is still at an early stage, writes Financial News quoting a source familiar with the matter. According to the plan offered by the consortium, within the next 10 years a new company will be established that will “run blockchain-powered applications for financial institutions.” Its shares will be distributed among those R3 members which take part in the investment round.

At the same time, the R3 lab developing and testing blockchain apps and all its products will remain under the control of the company. Thus, all the products coming from the lab will not be owned neither by the utility itself nor by its stakeholders.

The private consortium R3 was established in September 2015. The main aim of the organisation is to develop, test and promote financial applications working on the basis of the distributed ledger technology. The list of R3 partners includes such prominent international banks as Barclays, the Bank of America, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, UniCredit, Mizuho Bank and many others.

In April 2016, R3 announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. As a result, the consortium got access to 45 tools of the cloud-based platform Microsoft Azure, including those created by a decentralised protocols developer ConsenSys, financial and accounting services providers Ripple and Factom, blockchain solutions developer Eris Industries, payment processor BitPay and many more.

Later, R3 announced a successful trial of a blockchain banking platform tested by 11 banks on four continents. The banks were connected to a distributed ledger platform built within the Ethereum ecosystem and hosted in the virtual private network of Microsoft Azure.

Elena Platonova