Wall Street's closed blockchains — a 'race to the bottom': Etherealize CEO on financiers' fatal misconception
The financial elite is once again making the same mistake as a decade ago. Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, in his new market assessment, sharply criticized Wall Street's growing fascination with private blockchain consortia. This is not evolution but degradation—a return to the isolated systems against which the technology itself was created.
Raman rightly points to a fundamental flaw: consortium networks fragment liquidity and destroy the main advantages of a distributed ledger—interoperability and a shared pool of capital. Instead of a unified financial space, we get an archipelago of non-communicating "private oases." This is a direct path to stagnation, not progress.
My position here aligns with Raman's argument: privacy is not a property of the base layer but an overlay. Ethereum should remain an open foundation, while confidentiality and access control should be implemented at the application or L2 solution level. Drawing an analogy with the internet, he compares Ethereum to HTTP and secure layers to HTTPS. This is a precise and succinct metaphor that captures the essence of proper architecture.
Consortium Chains 2.0: A Repeat of Past Mistakes
The new wave of "private" projects, including Canton Network from Digital Asset, Arc from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe, is merely a slightly modernized version of old errors. Raman aptly calls this "consortium chains 2.0," recalling the fate of the notorious R3 and Hyperledger initiatives, which were actively promoted since 2016 and never managed to offer the market a viable alternative.
"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. And these are not just words. As early as June, he noted that traditional financial institutions are beginning to move from experiments to real-world use of Ethereum in business processes.
It is telling that the market is gradually coming to realize this. Private networks are a dead-end branch that merely creates an illusion of control, but in the long term deprives participants of access to global liquidity and innovation. The only question is how much more capital will be wasted before this becomes obvious to everyone.