CEO of Etherealize warns of Wall Street Alliance chain revival: fragmenting the ecosystem will reduce blockchain interoperability

Comparing news, Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, who is supported by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, warned that Wall Street's renewed pursuit of private and licensed “alliance chains” is recreating a fragmented system, weakening the interoperability and liquidity that blockchain is supposed to bring, which is equivalent to “bottom to bottom competition.” He pointed out that the rise of gated networks such as Digital Asset's Canton Network, Circle's ARC, and Stripe's Tempo is similar to the reenactment of alliance chains such as R3 and Hyperledger back then, and organizations will eventually fall into a situation where they compete with each other and require permission or membership to participate.

Raman emphasized that the Ethereum mainnet should be a globally open, permissionless basic layer similar to HTTP, where institutions can overlay licensing and privacy features at the application layer or L2 to achieve maximum interoperability and liquidity. Etherealize is committed to attracting TradFi to embrace Ethereum, a chain that already hosts billions of dollars in tokenized assets and supports a large number of DeFi settlements. The company received seed funding from Buterin and Foundation in January 2025, and completed Series A financing of 40 million US dollars in the same year.

He cites BlackRock's new Ethereum-based fund as an example. After the regulations are clear, institutional funds prefer an open network track owned by no one; if they choose an affiliate chain, they need to pay for the alliance and be bound by its rules, and incentives for non-early members will quickly fade away. Christian Catalini, founder of MIT's Cryptoeconomics Laboratory, also pointed out that if current enterprise sales-oriented licensing networks become mainstream, some of the competitive benefits of blockchain may not be realized.

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