Wall Street's closed blockchains — a "race to the bottom": Etherealize CEO accuses consortia of fragmenting liquidity
The financial mainstream is once again making the same mistake the industry went through a decade ago. Co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, Vivek Raman, sharply criticized the new wave of Wall Street's enthusiasm for closed blockchain networks with restricted access, calling this trend a "race to the bottom."
In my deep conviction, this statement hits the mark precisely. Consortium networks, which the largest banks and corporations are actively promoting today, do not just repeat past mistakes—they exacerbate them. Instead of unifying liquidity and creating a single settlement environment, these isolated circuits fragment capital and return us to the architecture of "walled gardens," against which blockchain was originally created.
Privacy should not mean isolation
Raman emphasizes that closed systems do not interact with each other, which undermines two fundamental advantages of the technology: interoperability and liquidity concentration. Instead of proliferating separate networks, he proposes building privacy and access control on top of public infrastructure—at the application or L2 solution level. His analogy with HTTP and HTTPS is highly illustrative here: the base protocol remains open and universal, while protection and restrictions are implemented at the upper layers.
Examples from the latest wave—Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Stripe's Tempo—Raman rightly calls "consortium chains 2.0." He recalls the sad fate of R3 and Hyperledger initiatives, which were actively promoted since 2016 but never achieved mass adoption. This is a historical lesson that the market seems stubbornly unwilling to learn.
"We firmly believe and have always held this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer," stated the head of Etherealize.
My view on the situation
It is telling that back in June, Raman argued that traditional finance had begun integrating Ethereum into real business processes. However, the current drift toward closed networks suggests that institutional players still do not fully understand the nature of the technology. If major players continue to build isolated circuits, they risk creating a fragmented market that will be significantly less efficient than the existing open ecosystem. In the long term, it is open networks with customizable privacy, not closed consortia, that will become the standard for institutional finance.