Wall Street's closed blockchains are a "race to the bottom": Etherealize CEO exposes the industry's core problem
The market has once again become fixated on the idea of isolated blockchain networks with restricted access, but this is a dead-end path that leads the industry back to fragmentation. Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, sharply criticized this trend during a recent interview, calling it a "race to the bottom." In his view, consortium chains, which financial giants are now actively promoting, are not just useless but harmful: they fragment liquidity and recreate the very isolated systems that blockchain was created to eliminate.
Raman's key complaint is that closed loops are unable to interact with each other, destroying the technology's two main advantages—compatibility and liquidity pooling. Instead of proliferating new isolated networks, he proposes building privacy and access control on top of open infrastructure. He illustrates his position with a simple analogy: Ethereum should become a base protocol, similar to HTTP, while layers with privacy and restrictions are the HTTPS level, which is overlaid on top without breaking the overall system.
Return to "Consortium Chains 2.0"
As examples of the new wave of such "closed" solutions, Raman cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Stripe's Tempo. He calls this "consortium chains 2.0," drawing direct parallels with failed initiatives of the past. I would remind you that since 2016, the market has enthusiastically welcomed the interbank project R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which never achieved real widespread adoption. History is repeating itself, and this is a worrying signal.
"We have always maintained that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer," Raman emphasizes. Notably, back in June he noted that traditional financial organizations had begun moving from experiments to real implementation of Ethereum-based solutions in their business processes. However, the current tilt toward closed networks threatens these achievements.
My view: Wall Street's desire for control and privacy is understandable, but strategically misguided. By creating isolated "walled gardens," they deprive themselves of the main thing—the network effect and deep liquidity that only an open market provides. In the long term, it is open systems, where privacy is addressed at the upper layers, that will attract more institutional capital than fragmented consortia doomed to local stagnation.