David Rutter

David E. Rutter is the founder of R3, the enterprise blockchain software company that built the Corda platform, and was billed at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as its Founder and Executive Chairman. R3 now lists Richard G. Brown as chief executive officer, a title Rutter still carried in an R3 press release of September 2025.

Rutter started out in a money market firm in 1984, the year he completed a business administration degree at Villanova University. His work in electronic trading began in 1994, when his joint-venture firm, Chicago Board Brokerage, launched an electronic trading platform for US Treasuries. He was later co-owner and chief executive for the Americas at Prebon Yamane, and in 2009 became chief executive of ICAP's electronic broking division, which ran the BrokerTec fixed income and EBS foreign exchange platforms.

Rutter founded R3 to build distributed ledger applications for banks. R3 says its Series A of more than $120 million, in 2017, was led by 40 global institutions. Alongside R3, Rutter founded LiquidityEdge, a US Treasuries trading platform, in 2015, and MarketAxess acquired it in November 2019 for $150 million. LedgerEdge, a blockchain based corporate bond venture he co-founded in 2020, was shut down in 2023, Ledger Insights reported. In September 2025 R3 launched R3 Labs, a new division working with the Solana network, and Rutter described it as a milestone in the company's mission "to reduce friction around tokenization".

In a 2022 Coalition Greenwich interview, Rutter said "DeFi is not going to work for institutional finance anytime soon", arguing that the industry had not spent 150 years building a regulatory regime only to throw it out.

Rutter spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 on the Taostats Stage on Day 2, 3 June, in a panel titled "From Enterprise Blockchain to Tokenised Markets: The Next Chapter of Institutional Finance", alongside Tim Grant and Ben Nadareski.