Wall Street's closed blockchains — a "race to the bottom": Etherealize CEO raises the alarm
Recently, a dangerous trend has been observed on Wall Street: major financial institutions are increasingly turning to closed blockchains with restricted access. However, in my deep conviction, this is a dead-end path that leads the industry back to isolated systems, against which it was originally created.
Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, a company advocating for Ethereum adoption in traditional finance, gave a sharp assessment of this trend. He called the new wave of consortium networks a "race to the bottom." The crux of the problem is that closed loops simply do not interact with each other. Instead of unifying liquidity and ensuring compatibility, they fragment the market into isolated silos, destroying two key advantages of blockchain technology.
Raman insists on a fundamentally different approach. Privacy and access control should be implemented not at the level of a separate blockchain, but on top of open public infrastructure—for example, through applications or L2 solutions. He draws an elegant analogy: in this model, Ethereum acts as HTTP—a global open protocol—while additional privacy and authorization layers act as HTTPS. This is logical and efficient, whereas creating separate closed networks is a step backward.
Ghosts of the Past and New "Consortium Chains 2.0"
As examples of the latest wave of such solutions, Raman cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, the Arc project from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. He dubbed them "consortium chains 2.0," rightly recalling 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 necessary as the base layer," emphasizes the head of Etherealize. Notably, back in June, Raman noted that traditional financial organizations had begun transitioning from experiments with Ethereum to real implementation in business processes.
From my point of view, Raman's arguments are extremely compelling. History has already shown the failure of closed corporate blockchains. The market is moving toward open systems, and Wall Street's attempts to isolate themselves look like a defensive reaction that, in the long run, will only weaken their positions. Institutions should not proliferate new "walled gardens" but rather learn to work with public infrastructure, which offers incomparably greater liquidity and network effects.