Etherealize CEO warns Wall Street’s private blockchain push is a race to the bottom

Vivek Raman has a message for the banks building private blockchains: you’re doing it wrong. The co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, a firm laser-focused on bridging Ethereum and traditional finance, has been making the case that Wall Street’s fixation on permissioned, closed-loop blockchain networks amounts to rebuilding the same siloed infrastructure that makes settlement slow and expensive today. The case against private chains Raman’s critique centers on a straightforward observation. Private blockchains operated by individual banks or consortiums sacrifice the very properties that make blockchain technology useful in the first place: transparency, interoperability, and shared settlement infrastructure. Raman’s background gives his argument some weight. Before founding Etherealize, he spent years in high-yield credit trading at Morgan Stanley and UBS, then moved into the crypto space through BitOoda. His conclusion is that public blockchain infrastructure, specifically Ethereum, offers what private networks fundamentally cannot: a neutral settlement layer that every counterparty can trust without having to trust each other. Etherealize has put real money behind this thesis. The ...