Etherealize CEO Slams Wall Street's Private Blockchains as 'Race to the Bottom'

Etherealize CEO Vivek Raman has criticized Wall Street's growing interest in private blockchains, calling it a 'race to the bottom'. These closed networks fragment liquidity and undermine two key advantages of blockchain technology: system interoperability and liquidity concentration.

Raman argues that consortium networks should be built on top of public infrastructure, rather than creating separate closed networks. He compares Ethereum to HTTP, suggesting that additional layers of restricted access and privacy can be added on top.

Examples of private blockchains include Canton Network by Digital Asset, Arc by Circle, and Tempo by Stripe. Raman refers to these as 'consortium chains 2.0', recalling the interbank initiative R3 and the corporate ecosystem Hyperledger, which were actively promoted but never fully developed.

Etherealize promotes Ethereum as an open base layer for institutional players, with Raman insisting that a global, open permissionless infrastructure is necessary as the base layer.