Wall Street's closed blockchains are a dead end: Etherealize head on the crisis of consortium networks
The market is once again witnessing a dangerous trend: financial giants are returning to the model of closed blockchain networks that has already proven its failure. Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, a company acting as Ethereum's ambassador to institutional investors, has harshly criticized this strategy, calling it a "race to the bottom."
The essence of Raman's criticism is crystal clear: consortium networks with restricted access fragment liquidity and recreate the isolated "walled gardens" that distributed ledger technology was supposed to move away from. Such closed circuits are unable to interact with each other, which destroys two fundamental advantages of blockchain — interoperability and the pooling of liquidity into a single whole.
Etherealize consistently promotes the idea of using Ethereum as an open base layer for traditional finance. Raman insists: privacy and access control are tasks for the application layer or L2 solutions, not a reason to create parallel networks. He draws an elegant analogy: Ethereum should become the "HTTP" for finance, with confidential transactions as "HTTPS" on top of it. The logic is flawless: why reinvent the wheel when you can build a secure tunnel over an existing highway?
As fresh examples of "consortium chains 2.0," Raman cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Stripe's Tempo payment network. He reminds us that we have already been down this path: the ambitious R3 and Hyperledger projects, actively promoted since 2016, never managed to become an industry standard, remaining niche experiments.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is needed as the base layer," emphasizes the head of Etherealize. According to him, it is precisely such a foundation that can deliver a network effect impossible to replicate in closed corporate sandboxes.
Notably, back in June, Raman argued that traditional financial institutions had begun moving from experiments to real adoption of Ethereum-based solutions in their business processes. However, the current wave of closed initiatives shows that the temptation to build one's own "controlled" infrastructure remains strong.
My analysis: Raman's criticism is absolutely justified. The history of R3 and Hyperledger clearly demonstrates that closed consortia die due to a lack of critical mass of users and liquidity. In a world where capital moves instantly and tolerates no barriers, attempting to lock it in an isolated network is a strategic mistake. Open infrastructure with privacy overlays is the only viable path for institutional adoption; otherwise, we risk another decade of disappointment.