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A growing wave of private, corporate-controlled blockchain networks is recreating the same siloed systems the technology was supposed to replace, according to Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, a company backed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The argument may sound like inside baseball for crypto developers, but the stakes reach anyone with a 401(k) or a bank account. The outcome of this debate will shape whether the next generation of financial infrastructure is open and competitive or locked behind corporate gatekeepers, much like the early internet battles between proprietary online services and the open web.
Consortium chains 2.0 and the 2016 playbook
Raman told CoinDesk that the current crop of permissioned networks, including Digital Asset’s Canton Network, Circle’s ARC payments system and Stripe’s Tempo blockchain, amounts to a rerun of earlier failed experiments. He pointed to R3’s consortium effort in 2016, which attracted major banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Santander before they withdrew before the year was out. The Hyperledger ecosystem drew similar enterprise interest that never fully delivered on blockchain’s promise.
“It’s like we’re having consortium chain 2.0. This is going to be a race to the bottom for consortium chains. You’re going to have consortium chains versus consortium chains.”
Raman compared Ethereum’s public mainnet to HTTP, the open base layer of the internet. Just as HTTPS added security on top of that open foundation, he argued, permissioned and privacy features should be built on top of a public chain rather than replacing it.
Enterprise money versus decentralization ideals
Not everyone agrees. Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and former chief economist of Facebook’s Diem stablecoin project, said the market may not care about decentralization the way blockchain’s originators intended.
“This phase is all about enterprise sales. 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.”
Catalini warned that if curated networks with clear corporate sponsors win out, “some of the pro-competitive benefits of blockchains will never materialize.”
Gated systems appeal to mainstream finance because they offer built-in privacy and reduced counterparty risk. Those are real selling points for institutions that handle sensitive transactions and face strict regulatory requirements.
BlackRock’s Ethereum bet and the regulatory factor
Raman pointed to BlackRock as evidence that open networks can attract serious institutional money. The asset management giant launched its BUIDL token on Ethereum and is now building new funds compliant with the GENIUS Act, the U.S. regulatory framework for stablecoins. Ethereum already serves as the base layer for billions of dollars in tokenized assets and underpins much of decentralized finance.
Etherealize itself was seeded by a grant from Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation in January 2025 and raised $40 million in Series A funding later that year. The company’s mission is to bring traditional finance firms onto Ethereum’s open mainnet.
“When we have regulatory clarity the institutional money goes toward open networks because that’s the rails that no one owns. If you go to consortium chains, you’re kind of paying the consortium.”
The tension is real and unresolved. Whether Wall Street’s next round of blockchain adoption looks more like the open internet or a collection of competing corporate intranets depends on which model proves it can handle real money at scale.
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