Has R3 Created its own “PayPal Mafia” Legacy in the Web3 Space?

Former PayPal employees and founders have experienced so much success since moving on from the company that they’re sometimes accused of “running Silicon Valley”. There’s some truth to this reputation. The group has come to be known as the “PayPal Mafia”. Tesla, LinkedIn, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, Palantir, Affirm, and so many more major companies were either founded or developed by these individuals, many of whom are Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni. 

Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink), Russel Simmons (Yelp), Peter Thiel (Palantir), and Jawed Karim (YouTube) are just a few of the huge names associated with the PayPal Mafia. Now, another company, this time in the Web3 space, looks set to produce a similarly talented cast of successful ex-employees. R3, which has been instrumental in developing digital solutions using DLT, blockchain, and tokenization technologies, is accumulating its own array of former staff who’ve gone on to become superstar founders and developers. 

With Bloomberg recently reporting that R3 is currently weighing its strategic options, including a potential sale, this will be a defining moment in its history; the birth of the “R3 Mafia” is a very real possibility.

Where Web3 Success Stories Are Forged

R3’s success was almost destined right from the start, as 40 institutional investors from 15 countries leapt at the opportunity to invest. Intel, along with 9 of the world’s leading investment banks, such as Bank of America, HSBC, Credit Suisse and Temasek, formed part of the $112m raised over four rounds. Since founding in 2014 and launching in 2015, the company has worked with big banks and financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Banco Santander Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, to name but a few. However, their Enterprise Blockchain developments have not always reached the market or been an outright success.

What is a company, however, if not its workforce? Like PayPal, R3 hired individuals who could innovate from the inside. Some of them, however, gave birth to ideas of their own and left to nurture those concepts into other, market-leading companies - especially in the blockchain space. Sui, Dogecoin, TEN and Tezos are all examples of businesses born from the minds of R3’s earliest employees. Perhaps R3’s hiring process was simply too good at spotting and nurturing brilliance. 

Moving On To Greater Things

R3’s developers first helped to write crucial code for Corda, its open permission distributed ledger technology that is now used by Citi, MetLife, China Merchants Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, BNP Paribas, and the Swiss stock exchange, among others. Then, many of these blockchain builders chose to move on and explore different ways in which the technology could drive change and innovation. 

R3 alumni includes Bitcoin core developers Mike Hearn and Peter Todd, as well as Ross Nicoll, who was a co-founding Core Developer of Dogecoin. There’s Gavin Thomas, who co-founded TEN (along with Cais Manai, another R3 alumni) and is now CEO of Obscuro Labs. Kostas Chalkias was Chief Cryptographer at R3 before co-founding Sui. Mike Ward was the Head of Product at R3 before going on to be CPO at IOG, the company behind the Cardano blockchain. Kathleen Breitman went on to co-found Tezos. The list doesn’t stop there. 

Both Angie Walker, R3’s former Head of Digital Asset Business Development, and Niki Ariyasinghe, former Head of Alliances and Partner Sales, have gone on to hold top senior positions at Chainlink. Ryan Rugg, who was once Global Head of Industry at R3, is now Global Head of Digital Assets at Citi, which, as mentioned, uses Corda, the technology built by R3. Zach Abrams and Sean Lu, who both also spent time at Coinbase, co-founded Evenly, a firm later acquired by Jack Dorsey’s Square. While this star-studded list of blockchain talent is already long, it can only keep expanding, with many former employees who could still deliver incredible products to the market. 

Among the startups mentioned, TEN stands out as a great example. The Ethereum Layer-2 raised $9m earlier this year in a funding round led by R3 and participated in by Republic Crypto, KuCoin Labs, Big Brain Capital, DWF Labs, and Magnus Capital. However, it’s not so much the investors that catch the eye, but the senior management team. More than half of the company’s leaders have come from R3 to develop technologies like programmable encryption, immediate bridges, and secure random number generation. TEN’s technology will enable the development of a new generation of on-chain games, DeFi, RWA, and institutional use cases, taking a notably different approach from R3, which provides solutions to the banking world. 

Now that New York-based R3 is entering discussions about its future with Ava Labs, the Solana Foundation, and Adhara, any decision made about going public will effectively create a ‘before and after’ effect. Those writing code and driving the company forward before any potential change may end up being part of the “R3 Mafia”, which means the list of success stories is almost certain to keep growing.