Etherealize co-founder and CEO Vivek Raman criticized Wall Street’s growing interest in private blockchains with restricted access in an interview with CoinDesk.
Raman stated that consortium networks fragment liquidity and revert the industry to isolated systems, which blockchain was meant to eliminate. He described this new wave of projects as a “race to the bottom.”
According to him, closed networks do not interact with each other and undermine two key advantages of the technology: system interoperability and liquidity concentration.
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 level or L2 solutions, rather than creating separate closed networks. He compared Ethereum to HTTP as a foundation, with additional layers of restricted access and privacy akin to HTTPS.
Examples of the latest wave of “closed” solutions include Canton Network by Digital Asset, Arc by Circle, and Tempo by Stripe. Raman referred to these as “consortium chains 2.0.” He recalled the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted since 2016 but never fully developed.
“We firmly believe and have always maintained that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer,” said the Etherealize CEO.
Earlier, in June, Raman claimed that traditional financial organizations began implementing Ethereum-based solutions into real business processes.
