Etherealize CEO: Wall Street's closed blockchains are a "race to the bottom"
A troubling trend is growing in the industry: the largest financial institutions on Wall Street are increasingly turning to closed blockchain networks with restricted access. However, as my observations of the market show, this movement leads not to progress, but to fragmentation and stagnation. Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, sharply criticized this approach during a recent interview, calling it a "race to the bottom."
Liquidity Fragmentation and Loss of Meaning
In my assessment, Raman's arguments are extremely precise. The consortium networks currently being actively promoted in the West fragment liquidity and return us to isolated systems—exactly the ones distributed ledger technology was supposed to move away from. Closed loops do not interact with each other, which undermines two fundamental advantages of blockchain: system interoperability and liquidity concentration. Instead of a unified global market, we get scattered "islands" that merely imitate decentralization.
Architecture of the Future: Open Base Layer
Etherealize, which I consider one of the key players in the institutional adoption of Ethereum, insists on a fundamentally different architecture. Raman proposes building privacy and access restrictions not at the level of individual networks, but on top of public infrastructure—at the level of applications or L2 solutions. His comparison with HTTP and HTTPS is highly illustrative here: an open protocol serves as the foundation, while additional layers of encryption and authorization ensure security without destroying the unified ecosystem. This is precisely the approach that allows preserving the advantages of a public blockchain without sacrificing the requirements of institutional clients.
Lessons from the Past and Current Examples
The current wave of "closed" projects—Canton Network from Digital Asset, Arc from Circle, Tempo from Stripe—is essentially "consortium chains 2.0." I cannot help but draw a parallel with the unfortunate experience of R3 and Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016 but never achieved real scaling. Raman rightly reminds us of this. We have already seen how attempts to create isolated corporate networks end: they die or remain niche tools that bring no systemic benefit.
"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. And I completely agree with him. Notably, back in June he pointed out that traditional financial organizations had begun integrating Ethereum-based solutions into real business processes. This confirms: the path to institutional adoption lies not through closed sandboxes, but through open standards.
My conclusion: as long as Wall Street continues to proliferate closed networks, we will only witness an imitation of innovation. A real breakthrough is possible only when institutions recognize the value of open infrastructure as a base layer, rather than another corporate experiment.