Financial innovation company R3 is planning to raise $200 million from member banks of the blockchain consortium in return for equity stakes in a new company that will run applications based on blockchain technology for financial institutions.

A source familiar with this development told Financial News that negotiations have already taking place and are still at an early stage, adding that R3 is proposing to hold a stake in the company and run it for ten years.

Led by former ICAP electronic broking CEO David Rutter, R3 is an innovation firm focused on building and empowering the next generation of global financial services technology. The blockchain consortium was launched in September 2015 and includes the world’s leading financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Nordea, Deutsche Bank and many others. In December, it concluded its first distributed ledger bank membership round and officially opened the second round in March.

In April, R3 and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a strategic partnership in order to accelerate the use of distributed ledger technologies among R3 member banks and global financial markets.

The consortium aims to design and deliver advanced distributed/shared ledger technologies to global financial markets. Earlier this year, it announced the successful completion of a landmark distributed ledger experiment that involved 11 of the world’s largest financial institutions. In March, the consortium announced the successful trial of five distinct blockchain technologies in parallel in the first test of its kind. The trial represented the trading of fixed income assets between 40 of the world’s largest banks across the blockchains, using multiple cloud technology providers within R3’s Global Collaborative Lab.