TradFi obsession with permissioned blockchains is 'race to the bottom,' Etherealize CEO Vivek Raman warns

Similar systems, however, have been around the blockchain space for years in one form or another. Early adopters may recall the reams of banks that joined R3’s consortium effort back in 2016, for example, or the many enterprise players that flocked to the Linux-affiliated Hyperledger ecosystem. R3 didn't make it to the end of the year before the big banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Santander withdrew from the system.

“It's like we're having consortium chain 2.0,” said Raman in an interview. “This is going to end up being a race to the bottom for consortium chains. You're going to have consortium chains versus consortium chains.”

Raman likened Ethereum’s mainnet to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, the base layer of the internet itself. A more secure, permissioned, privacy-enabled layer, HTTPS, sits on top. An open base layer is necessary, Raman said, because that's the only way you can have maximum interoperability and maximum liquidity in one place, he said.

“We strongly believe, and always have done, that you need a global, open, permissionless infrastructure as the base layer,” Raman said. “Then you can build all the permissioning on top of it. Whether that's at the app layer, whether that's the L2 layer, that's where you should have the customizability.”