Vivek Raman has watched this movie before, and he doesn’t think the sequel ends any differently.
The co-founder and CEO of Etherealize argues that the current wave of private, gated blockchains eats away at the potential the technology was designed to achieve. His reasoning is blunt: these networks differ fundamentally from open, public chains like Ethereum and Solana because they create silos that don’t talk to each other.
Consortium chain 2.0, and Raman means that as an insult
“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 he’s describing are the ones traditional finance keeps circling back to. Digital Asset’s Canton Network. Circle’s stablecoin payments play ARC. Stripe's vertically integrated Tempo blockchain. All of them tout inherent privacy and reduced counterparty risk, and both attributes land well with mainstream finance.
Raman calls them consortium chains. He’s not being generous with the term.
The 2016 version already collapsed
Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago will recognize the setup. Reams of banks joined R3’s consortium effort back in 2016. Enterprise players flocked to the Linux-affiliated Hyperledger ecosystem.
R3 didn’t make it to the end of the year before Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Santander withdrew from the system. That’s the track record the current crop is building on, whether or not anyone in the room mentions it.
What’s different this time is that the money is closer. That’s also what makes the outcome harder to call.
Raman’s analogy is HTTP, not a whitepaper
Rather than argue purity, Raman reaches for the plumbing of the internet. He likened Ethereum‘s mainnet to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, the base layer of the internet itself. HTTPS, the more secure, permissioned, privacy-enabled layer, sits on top.
An open base layer is necessary, Raman said, because that’s the only way you can have maximum interoperability and maximum liquidity in one 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 pitch is that privacy isn’t the thing you give up by staying public. It’s the thing you build one layer higher.
Does the market still care about decentralization?
Familiarity with blockchains and distributed-ledger technology has moved on since 2016. So the real question isn’t whether open networks are technically better. It’s whether buyers care.
The rapid adoption of gated systems with clear sponsors suggests the answer is “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.”
That’s a sharper framing than Raman’s, and it comes from someone with no token position to defend. Catalini isn’t saying open networks lose. He’s saying nobody knows yet, and the deciding factor is a sales process, not a technical one.
Etherealize exists because enterprise sales is the battlefield
Etherealize works to attract traditional finance firms to Ethereum. The 10-year-old blockchain is a base layer for billions of dollars in tokenized assets and the settlement layer underpinning much of decentralized finance. The current job is pulling institutions such as BlackRock into the permissionless system where all transactions are visible to everyone.
The company was seeded by a grant from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation in January 2025, then raised $40 million in Series A funding later the same year.
BlackRock’s funds are the evidence Raman points to
BlackRock’s new Ethereum-based funds are a sign of things moving in what Raman called the right direction. The firm started with the BUIDL token on Ethereum before regulatory clarity arrived. Its next set of funds is compliant with the GENIUS Act, the U.S. regulatory framework for stablecoins.
Raman’s read on why that matters comes down to who collects the toll.
“When we have regulatory clarity the institutional money goes toward open networks because that’s the rails that no one owns,” Ramen 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 last clause is the part worth holding onto. The failure mode of a consortium chain isn’t that it breaks. It’s that membership stops paying for everyone who wasn’t in the founding room, which is close to what happened to R3 within a single year.
If you’re evaluating where to build, the question to ask a consortium chain’s sponsor is straightforward: what do the incentives look like for member number 50?
