Etherealize CEO: Wall Street's closed blockchains are a "race to the bottom"
Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, has sharply criticized Wall Street's growing enthusiasm for closed blockchain networks with restricted access. In his view, this trend is leading the industry into a dead end, reviving the fragmentation that distributed ledger technology was supposed to eliminate from the market.
In his analysis, Raman emphasizes that consortium networks, despite their external appeal to institutional players, undermine two fundamental advantages of blockchain: interoperability and liquidity concentration. He describes the creation of isolated circuits incapable of interacting with each other as nothing less than a "race to the bottom." Instead of building new closed infrastructures, the head of Etherealize insists that privacy and access control should be implemented at higher layers—in applications or within L2 solutions—on top of an open base layer.
Raman illustrates his position with an analogy to internet protocols: in this paradigm, Ethereum acts as HTTP—an open and universal foundation—while additional privacy layers, like HTTPS, should be built on top without breaking the overall architecture. This approach, he argues, is the only way to preserve network effects and global liquidity.
As vivid examples of "consortium chains 2.0," he cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and the recent launch of Tempo by Stripe. Raman reminds that similar initiatives have already appeared in history: the R3 interbank platform and the Hyperledger ecosystem, actively promoted since 2016, failed to achieve meaningful scale, which only confirms his concerns.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer," Raman stated. It is worth noting that back in June, he documented the shift of traditional financial organizations from experiments to real implementation of Ethereum-based solutions in business processes.
Analyst's comment: Raman's criticism is absolutely justified. Repeating the mistakes of the past decade, when corporate blockchains died due to a lack of network effects, threatens new billion-dollar losses. However, until Wall Street realizes that the value of cryptocurrency lies in openness and liquidity, not isolation, we will continue to see these cyclical attempts to reinvent the wheel in a closed sandbox.