Wall Street's Blockchain Push Hits Roadblock

Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, warns that Wall Street's private blockchain push is failing to deliver on its promise. The company, backed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, believes that these corporate-controlled networks are recreating the same siloed systems that blockchain technology was meant to replace.

Raman points to the 2016 consortium effort led by R3 as an example of how this approach has failed in the past. The current crop of permissioned networks, including Digital Asset's Canton Network and Circle's ARC payments system, are seen as a rerun of earlier experiments that never fully delivered on blockchain's promise.

According to Raman, Ethereum's public mainnet is like HTTP, the open base layer of the internet. Just as HTTPS added security on top of this foundation, he argues that permissioned and privacy features should be built on top of a public chain rather than replacing it.

Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, disagrees with Raman's assessment. He believes that enterprise sales are driving the current market, and it's unclear whether the focus will remain on decentralization or shift towards curated networks with clear corporate sponsors.