Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, expressed strong criticism regarding Wall Street's increasing fascination with private blockchains that limit access in a recent interview with CoinDesk.
He argued that consortium networks are fragmenting liquidity and reverting the industry back to isolated systems, which blockchain technology was meant to eliminate. He characterized the emergence of these new projects as a "race to the bottom."
According to Raman, these closed systems do not interact with one another, undermining two fundamental advantages of blockchain technology: system interoperability and liquidity concentration.
Etherealize advocates for Ethereum as an open foundational layer for institutional participants. Raman emphasizes that privacy and access restrictions should be built on top of public infrastructure—at the application level or through Layer 2 solutions—rather than creating separate closed networks. He likened Ethereum to HTTP as a foundation, while additional layers with restricted access and privacy can be compared to HTTPS.
Examples of this latest wave of "closed" solutions include the Canton Network from Digital Asset, Arc from Circle, and Tempo from Stripe. Raman referred to the current trend as "consortium chains 2.0," recalling the unsuccessful interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016.
"We firmly believe and have always maintained that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as a foundational layer," said the Etherealize CEO.
It is worth noting that in June, Raman claimed that traditional financial institutions had begun to integrate Ethereum-based solutions into real business processes.