Chapter Etherealize: Wall Street's closed blockchains are a "race to the bottom" and a step backward for the industry.
Recently, a troubling trend has emerged on Wall Street: major financial institutions are increasingly turning to closed blockchain networks with restricted access. However, in my deep conviction, this path leads to a dead end. Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, sharply criticized such initiatives in a recent interview, calling them nothing less than a "race to the bottom."
The essence of Raman's objections is perfectly clear and well-founded. The consortium networks currently being actively promoted not only fragment liquidity but also return us to the isolated systems that distributed ledger technology was supposed to move away from. Closed circuits that do not interact with each other destroy two key advantages of blockchain: system interoperability and pooled liquidity. Instead of a unified economic space, we get scattered "digital reservations."
Open Base vs. "Consortium Chains 2.0"
Etherealize consistently advocates the position that Ethereum should become the open base layer for institutional players. Raman insists: privacy and access control are tasks for the application layer or L2 solutions, not a reason to proliferate separate closed networks. He draws a vivid analogy: Ethereum is HTTP, the foundation, while access restrictions and privacy are HTTPS, the overlay. The logic is ironclad: why reinvent the wheel by breaking base-level interoperability when everything needed can be implemented on top of public infrastructure?
As examples of this new wave of "closed" solutions, he cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, the Arc project from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. All of these are vivid representatives of what I would call "consortium chains 2.0." Sadly, history is repeating itself. We have already seen how the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, actively promoted since 2016, never gained proper traction or mass adoption. Current attempts appear to be following the same script.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is needed as the base layer," emphasized the head of Etherealize. And one cannot but agree with this. Notably, back in June, Raman noted that traditional financial organizations had begun integrating Ethereum-based solutions into real business processes. However, the current tilt toward closed networks raises serious concerns about the future of the entire ecosystem.
My view: The pursuit of apparent security and control through closed networks is a strategic mistake. In the long term, it is open, interoperable systems like Ethereum that will become the "reinforced concrete" foundation for the finance of the future. Those who are now building "gardens behind high walls" risk being left out of the global economy, which is inevitably moving toward integration and openness.