Wall Street's closed blockchains are a "race to the bottom": Etherealize CEO explains why isolation is destroying the industry
Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, has sharply criticized the financial mainstream. In his view, Wall Street's current infatuation with private, permissioned blockchains is not evolution but degradation, returning the industry to the isolated systems that distributed ledger technology was supposed to move away from.
Consortium networks as a step backward
Raman argues that consortium chains, which major banks and corporations are actively promoting today, fragment liquidity and destroy two key advantages of blockchain: interoperability and capital concentration. He calls this wave of projects nothing less than a "race to the bottom." Closed circuits do not interact with each other, effectively replicating the old architecture of siloed databases, just in a new wrapper.
Instead of proliferating separate closed networks, Raman insists on the opposite approach. Privacy and access control should be built on top of public infrastructure—at the application level or through second-layer (L2) solutions. He draws an analogy with the internet: in this model, Ethereum acts as HTTP—an open base protocol—while additional layers with restrictions act as HTTPS, which provides security without breaking the network itself.
New "consortium chains 2.0"
As examples of the latest wave of such "closed" solutions, he cites Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Stripe's Tempo. Raman draws parallels with past failures: the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016, never achieved mass adoption. According to him, history is repeating itself, and current projects risk sharing their fate.
"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 stated that traditional financial organizations were moving from experiments to real implementation of Ethereum in business processes.
My comment: Raman's position is not just marketing in favor of Ethereum, but a reflection of a fundamental divide in the industry. While institutional players seek a "safe sandbox," they miss blockchain's core value—the network effect. Closed networks can solve local problems, but they do not create a new economy. The only question is how much time and capital will be wasted before the market realizes this.