Wall Street's closed blockchains are a 'race to the bottom': opinion of the head of Etherealize
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 bluntly calls a "race to the bottom."
In his analysis, Raman emphasizes that consortium networks, despite their apparent efficiency, fragment liquidity and recreate the very isolated systems that distributed ledger technology was designed to eliminate. Closed loops are unable to interact with each other, which negates two fundamental advantages of blockchain: interoperability and liquidity concentration.
Open Base vs. Closed Overlays
Etherealize, which I consider one of the most consistent voices in defense of institutional Ethereum, promotes the concept of public infrastructure as the base layer. Raman insists that privacy and access control should be implemented at the application or L2 solution level, rather than by creating separate closed networks. He draws an elegant analogy: Ethereum is HTTP, and additional privacy layers are HTTPS. The logic is flawless: why invent a new "data transfer protocol" when you can simply add encryption to the existing one?
As examples of the latest wave of such "consortium chains 2.0," he cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, the Arc project from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. Raman rightly reminds us of the sad fate of their predecessors—the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate platform Hyperledger, which were actively promoted starting in 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," stated the head of Etherealize, emphasizing the strategic importance of the absence of permissions and trust at the fundamental level.
Notably, back in June, Raman noted the shift of traditional financial organizations from experiments to real-world use of Ethereum in business processes. However, the current trend toward closedness raises serious concerns for me. The market risks repeating past mistakes, when corporate blockchains became mired in their own protocols and failed to create network effects. The lesson we must learn is that the value of a blockchain is directly proportional to its openness and ability to interoperate.