Etherealize CEO warns Wall Street about the revival of alliance chains: Fragmenting the ecosystem will undermine blockchain interoperability

Vitalik Buterin and Etherealize co-founder and CEO Vivek Raman, supported by the Ethereum Foundation, warned that Wall Street's renewed enthusiasm for private, permissioned "consortium chains" is recreating a fragmented system, undermining the interoperability and liquidity that blockchain should bring, akin to "race to the bottom." He pointed out the rise of gated networks such as Digital Asset's Canton Network, Circle's ARC, and Stripe's Tempo, reminiscent of the R3 and Hyperledger consortium chains 2.0 from years past, where institutions will ultimately find themselves in a situation of competing consortium chains, needing permission or membership to participate.

Raman emphasized that the Ethereum mainnet should serve as a globally open, permissionless foundation layer similar to HTTP, where institutions can overlay permission and privacy features at the application layer or L2 to achieve maximum interoperability and liquidity. Etherealize is committed to attracting TradFi to embrace Ethereum, which has already hosted billions of dollars in tokenized assets and supported a large amount of DeFi settlements. The company received seed funding from Buterin and the foundation in January 2025 and completed a $40 million Series A financing in the same year.

He cited examples such as BlackRock's new fund based on Ethereum, stating that once regulations are clear, institutional funds are more inclined towards open network tracks that are not proprietary; choosing consortium chains would require paying the consortium and being bound by its rules, with incentives for non-early members quickly fading. Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, also pointed out that if permissioned networks driven by enterprise sales become mainstream, some competitive benefits of blockchain may not be realized.