Wall Street's private blockchains — a 'race to the bottom': Etherealize CEO calls for a return to open infrastructure
Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, has sharply criticized the growing trend on Wall Street—the creation of closed blockchain networks with restricted access. In his view, this path leads the industry into a dead end, which he calls nothing less than a "race to the bottom."
In his analysis, Raman emphasizes that consortium networks, which major financial institutions are actively promoting, fragment liquidity and return us to isolated systems. It is precisely this isolation that blockchain was supposed to free the financial world from. The technology's key advantages—system interoperability and liquidity concentration—are completely nullified in closed loops that do not interact with each other.
Open Base Layer vs. "Consortium Chains 2.0"
Etherealize, which Raman leads, consistently promotes Ethereum as an open base layer for institutional players. His position is crystal clear: privacy and access restrictions should be implemented at the application or L2 solution level, not by creating separate closed networks. Raman draws a vivid analogy: Ethereum is HTTP, the foundation of the entire system, while additional privacy layers are HTTPS—an overlay that does not require replacing the protocol itself.
As examples of the latest wave of such "closed" initiatives, he cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, the Arc project from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. Raman calls these "consortium chains 2.0" and reminds us of the sad fate of their predecessors—the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016 but never gained widespread adoption.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is needed as the base layer," states the head of Etherealize. Notably, back in June, Raman noted that traditional financial organizations had begun integrating Ethereum-based solutions into real business processes.
My analysis: Raman's criticism is absolutely justified. The history of R3 and Hyperledger clearly demonstrated that closed consortia cannot create network effects. I believe the future of institutional crypto finance lies in a hybrid approach, where the public blockchain serves as the settlement layer, and privacy is ensured through cryptographic methods rather than isolation. Wall Street will eventually have to realize this, or it will repeat the mistakes of the past decade.