Etherealize CEO Calls Wall Street's Private Blockchains a 'Race to the Bottom'

Etherealize co-founder and CEO Vivek Raman criticized the growing interest of Wall Street in private, permissioned blockchains in an interview with CoinDesk.

Raman stated that consortium networks fragment liquidity and return the industry to the isolated systems that blockchain was meant to eliminate. He called this new wave of such projects a "race to the bottom."

According to him, private loops do not interact with each other and undermine two key advantages of the technology: system interoperability and the concentration of liquidity.

Etherealize promotes Ethereum as an open base layer for institutional players. Raman insists that privacy and access restrictions should logically be built on top of public infrastructure—at the application or L2 solution level—rather than multiplying separate private networks. He compared Ethereum to HTTP as a foundation, with additional permissioned and private layers to HTTPS.

Examples of this latest wave of "closed" solutions are the Canton Network from Digital Asset, Circle's Arc project, and Stripe's Tempo. Raman called what's happening "consortium chains 2.0." He recalled the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted from 2016 but never truly took off.

"We firmly believe and have always maintained this position that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as a base layer," said the head of Etherealize.

Recall that in June, Raman claimed that traditional financial organizations had begun to implement solutions based on Ethereum into real business processes.