Vivek Raman has seen this film once already, and he’s not expecting the sequel to have a different ending.
The Etherealize co-founder and CEO contends that today’s surge of gated, private blockchains chips away at what the technology was built to deliver. His logic is unsparing: such networks are fundamentally unlike open public chains including Ethereum and Solana, because they produce silos with no way of talking to one another.
‘Consortium chain 2.0’ — and he means it as a jab
“It’s like we’re having consortium chain 2.0,” said Raman in an interview. “This is going to end up being a race to the bottom for consortium chains. You’re going to have consortium chains versus consortium chains.”
The systems in his crosshairs are precisely the ones traditional finance keeps returning to. Canton Network, from Digital Asset. ARC, Circle’s stablecoin payments effort. Stripe’s vertically integrated Tempo blockchain. Each one advertises built-in privacy and lower counterparty risk — a pair of selling points that resonate with mainstream finance.
Raman labels them consortium chains. The term isn’t meant charitably.
The 2016 edition already fell apart
The setup will look familiar to anyone who was watching ten years ago. Banks signed up in droves for R3’s consortium push back in 2016. Enterprise outfits piled into the Linux-affiliated Hyperledger ecosystem.
Before that year was out, R3 had lost Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Santander, all of which pulled out of the system. That’s the history the latest batch is building on top of, whether or not it comes up in the room.
The distinction this time around is that the money is nearer at hand. Which is also why the outcome is tougher to predict.
Raman’s comparison is HTTP, not a whitepaper
Instead of arguing over purity, Raman points to the internet’s plumbing. He compared Ethereum’s mainnet to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP — the internet’s base layer. Sitting above it is HTTPS, the permissioned, privacy-enabled, more secure layer.
A base layer has to be open, Raman said, because it’s the only route to maximum interoperability and maximum liquidity in a single place.
“We strongly believe, and always have done, that you need a global, open, permissionless infrastructure as the base layer,” Raman said. “Then you can build all the permissioning on top of it. Whether that’s at the app layer, whether that’s the L2 layer, that’s where you should have the customizability.”
The argument, in short: privacy isn’t what you sacrifice by staying public. It’s what you construct one level up.
Does the market still care about decentralization?
Understanding of blockchains and distributed-ledger technology has come a long way since 2016. Which means the genuine question isn’t whether open networks are technically superior. It’s whether buyers care.
How quickly gated systems with identifiable sponsors are being adopted points to an answer of “No,” said Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and the former chief economist of Facebook’s Diem stablecoin project.
“This phase is all about enterprise sales,” Catalini said in an interview. “So there’s this really interesting tension just now, right as the real money is about to come in, and it’s not clear which way we will land. If we land on these networks that are more curated and have a clear sponsor and anchor entity shaping their rules, then some of the pro-competitive benefits of blockchains will never materialize.”
It’s a keener framing than Raman’s, and it arrives from someone with no token stake to protect. Catalini isn’t declaring open networks the loser. He’s saying the result is still unknown, and that what settles it is a sales process rather than a technical one.
Etherealize was built for the enterprise sales fight
Etherealize’s business is drawing traditional finance firms toward Ethereum. Now a decade old, the blockchain serves as the base layer for billions of dollars of tokenized assets and as the settlement layer beneath much of decentralized finance. The task at hand is bringing institutions like BlackRock onto the permissionless system, where every transaction is visible to everyone.
A grant from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation seeded the company in January 2025; a $40 million Series A round followed later that year.
BlackRock’s funds are the proof point Raman cites
To Raman, BlackRock’s new Ethereum-based funds signal movement in what he called the right direction. The asset manager’s first step was the BUIDL token on Ethereum, launched before regulatory clarity existed. The funds that follow comply with the GENIUS Act, the U.S. regulatory framework governing stablecoins.
Why that matters, in Raman’s telling, comes down to who takes the toll.
“When we have regulatory clarity the institutional money goes toward open networks because that’s the rails that no one owns,” Raman said. “If you go to consortium chains, you’re kind of paying the consortium. You have to get permission or be one of the consortium members. And if you’re not an early consortium member, then the incentives go away very quickly.”
That final clause is the one to hang on to. A consortium chain’s failure mode isn’t that the thing breaks. It’s that belonging stops being worth it for everyone outside the founding room — roughly what befell R3 inside of twelve months.
For anyone weighing where to build, there’s a simple question to put to a consortium chain’s sponsor: how do the incentives look for member number 50?
