Wall Street's closed blockchains — a 'race to the bottom': Etherealize head condemns consortium networks to failure
The financial mainstream is once again making the same mistake it did a decade ago. Co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, Vivek Raman, sharply criticized the new wave of Wall Street enthusiasm for closed blockchain networks with restricted access, calling this trend nothing less than a "race to the bottom."
In my deep conviction, this is an extremely accurate formulation. Consortium networks, which major banks and corporations are actively promoting today, represent a step backward to the isolated systems that distributed ledger technology was originally meant to move away from. Raman rightly points out that such closed circuits are unable to interact with each other, which undermines two fundamental advantages of blockchain: system interoperability and liquidity concentration. Instead of a single liquidity pool, we get fragmented "lakes" that only splinter the market.
HTTP and HTTPS as a metaphor for open infrastructure
Raman's key argument is that privacy and access restrictions should not be a property of the base layer. It is more logical to implement them at the application level or through L2 solutions, on top of public infrastructure. The comparison with HTTP and HTTPS is extremely illustrative here: no one builds a separate "closed internet" for banking transactions; instead, encryption protocols are used atop an open standard. Ethereum, according to the head of Etherealize, should play the role of precisely such a global base protocol, rather than another corporate sandbox.
As examples of the latest wave of "closed" solutions, Raman cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, the Arc project from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. He aptly dubbed this phenomenon "consortium chains 2.0," recalling the sad fate of their predecessors—the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted as early as 2016 but never achieved real large-scale development.
Etherealize's position and the institutional vector
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer," Raman emphasizes. This position is not new, but it is extremely important at the current moment when traditional finance, burned by experiments, is seeking compromise paths. Notably, back in June, the head of Etherealize stated that traditional financial organizations were moving from experiments to real implementation of Ethereum-based solutions in business processes.
My analysis: In the long term, it is the proponents of open networks who are right. Closed consortia are a dead-end branch of evolution that merely delays the inevitable integration of public blockchains into institutional infrastructure, but does not cancel it. The only question is how much more capital will be wasted on this "race" to nowhere.