Wall Street's closed blockchains — a "race to the bottom": Etherealize CEO raises the alarm
Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, has sharply criticized the growing trend on Wall Street — the fascination with closed blockchains with restricted access. In his view, consortium networks are a step backward that fragments liquidity and returns us to the isolated systems that distributed ledger technology was supposed to leave behind once and for all.
Raman calls this new wave of projects nothing less than a "race to the bottom." His main thesis: closed circuits are unable to interact with each other, which destroys two key advantages of blockchain — system interoperability and liquidity concentration. Instead of creating parallel infrastructures, the industry, he says, should build privacy on top of public networks.
Ethereum as a Foundation, Not an Exception
Etherealize, which Raman leads, positions Ethereum as an open base layer for institutional players. He insists: privacy and access restrictions are more logically implemented at the application or L2 solution level, rather than spawning separate closed networks. He illustrates his position with an analogy to the internet: Ethereum is HTTP, a universal protocol, while additional layers with restricted access and privacy are HTTPS, an overlay, not a replacement for the foundation.
As examples of the latest wave of "closed" solutions, Raman cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Tempo from Stripe. He calls these "consortium chains 2.0" and reminds of the unfortunate experience of the past: the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016, never gained real traction.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer," emphasizes the head of Etherealize.
Notably, back in June, Raman stated that traditional financial organizations were moving from experiments with Ethereum to real implementation of solutions based on it in business processes.
My analysis: Raman's criticism is justified, but it is worth acknowledging that the institutional pull toward closed networks is driven not by technical backwardness, but by regulatory and legal risks. However, the history of R3 and Hyperledger clearly shows: without network effects and open liquidity, such projects are doomed to stagnation. The question is whether hybrid models, combining a public foundation and private overlays, can become the compromise that satisfies both conservative banks and the crypto community.