Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, warned that Wall Street’s renewed interest in private, permissioned consortium chains is recreating siloed systems and weakening the interoperability and liquidity blockchain was supposed to deliver. Raman, whose company is backed by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, described the trend as a race to the bottom.
Raman points to a new wave of gated networks
He named Digital Asset’s Canton Network, Circle’s ARC and Stripe’s Tempo as examples of gated networks gaining traction. In his view, their rise echoes a consortium-chain model seen in the era of R3 and Hyperledger, which he framed as a version 2.0 replay. The result, he said, is that institutions could end up competing across separate consortium networks where firms need permission or membership to participate.
Ethereum mainnet as the open base layer
Raman argued that Ethereum mainnet should function as a global, open and permissionless base layer, much like HTTP. Institutions, he said, can add permissioning and privacy at the application layer or through layer-2 networks while keeping access to the broadest possible interoperability and liquidity.
Etherealize is focused on bringing traditional finance onto Ethereum. According to the report, the network already carries billions of dollars in tokenized assets and supports a large amount of DeFi settlement. The company received seed funding from Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation in January 2025, then completed a $40 million Series A later that year.
Open networks may gain as rules become clearer
Raman cited BlackRock’s new Ethereum-based fund as an example, saying that once regulation becomes clearer, institutional capital is more likely to move onto open networks that are not owned by a single proprietary operator. By contrast, joining a consortium chain means paying the consortium and operating under its rules, while incentives for participants that were not early members can fade quickly.
Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, also said that if permissioned networks built around enterprise sales become the dominant model, some of blockchain’s pro-competition gains may never materialize.