Etherealize CEO warns Wall Street’s private blockchain push is a race to the bottom

Vivek Raman has a message for the banks building private blockchains: you’re doing it wrong.

The co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, a firm laser-focused on bridging Ethereum and traditional finance, has been making the case that Wall Street’s fixation on permissioned, closed-loop blockchain networks amounts to rebuilding the same siloed infrastructure that makes settlement slow and expensive today.

The case against private chains

Raman’s critique centers on a straightforward observation. Private blockchains operated by individual banks or consortiums sacrifice the very properties that make blockchain technology useful in the first place: transparency, interoperability, and shared settlement infrastructure.

Raman’s background gives his argument some weight. Before founding Etherealize, he spent years in high-yield credit trading at Morgan Stanley and UBS, then moved into the crypto space through BitOoda. His conclusion is that public blockchain infrastructure, specifically Ethereum, offers what private networks fundamentally cannot: a neutral settlement layer that every counterparty can trust without having to trust each other.

Etherealize has put real money behind this thesis. The firm raised $40 million to build out zero-knowledge privacy infrastructure and institutional applications designed to make Ethereum palatable for regulated financial entities. The pitch is elegant: use ZK proofs to give institutions the privacy they need for compliance while still settling on a public, transparent network.

Ethereum as digital oil

Raman and his team have been framing ETH as “digital oil,” the essential fuel for tokenized markets. Etherealize’s stated goal is to move trillions of dollars on-chain within three to five years. Raman has specifically highlighted the $16 trillion US mortgage market as a prime candidate for tokenization, arguing that ZK tools can solve the privacy requirements that have historically kept institutional players on the sidelines.

In a June 2026 interview, Raman stated that the foundational infrastructure for Ethereum on Wall Street is nearly complete. The shift he described wasn’t about institutions running pilot programs anymore. It was about deeper integration, the kind where tokenized assets start moving through actual balance sheets rather than innovation lab presentations.

That said, ETH’s price hasn’t exactly reflected this institutional optimism. There’s a visible disconnect between the adoption narrative Etherealize is pushing and the market’s current valuation of Ether. Raman has acknowledged this gap, essentially arguing that price will eventually catch up to infrastructure reality.

Why the private vs. public debate matters now

Tokenization has gone from theoretical to operational across Wall Street in the past 18 months. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Franklin Templeton’s on-chain money market products, and a growing roster of real-world asset protocols have demonstrated that putting traditional financial instruments on blockchain rails actually works.

The question is which rails. Banks have a natural instinct to control their own infrastructure, and it maps neatly onto regulatory expectations around data custody and compliance. The problem, as Raman frames it, is that this approach fragments liquidity and creates exactly the kind of settlement friction that blockchain was supposed to eliminate.

The ZK privacy angle is what makes this pitch viable rather than purely ideological. Institutions can’t, and shouldn’t, broadcast their trading positions and client data on a public ledger. Zero-knowledge proofs offer a technical solution: prove you’re compliant, prove you own the asset, prove the transaction is valid, all without revealing the underlying data. Etherealize’s $40 million raise is largely directed at making this technology production-ready for Wall Street.

The competitive landscape is also worth watching. Ethereum isn’t the only public chain angling for institutional adoption. Solana, Avalanche, and purpose-built chains like Provenance have their own tokenization strategies. Etherealize’s bet is that Ethereum’s security guarantees, developer ecosystem, and network effects make it the default choice for institutional-grade settlement.

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