Ethereum advocate warns Wall Street’s private blockchain push is failing

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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.