Ethereum Advocate Warns Wall Street’s Private Blockchain Push Risks a ‘Race to the Bottom’

Similar initiatives have existed in the blockchain space for years in various forms. Industry veterans may recall the numerous banks that joined R3’s consortium effort in 2016, or the many enterprise players that gravitated toward the Linux-affiliated Hyperledger ecosystem. R3 struggled to survive the year, as major institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Santander withdrew from the system.

“It’s like we’re having consortium chain 2.0,” Raman stated in an interview. “This is destined to become a race to the bottom for consortium chains, where you’ll end up with one consortium chain competing directly against another.”

Raman compared Ethereum’s mainnet to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the foundational layer of the internet. Just as a secure, permissioned, and privacy-enabled layer like HTTPS sits atop HTTP, an open base layer is essential, Raman explained, as it is the only way to achieve maximum interoperability and liquidity in a single ecosystem.

“We have always strongly believed that you need a global, open, permissionless infrastructure as the base layer,” Raman said. “Permissioning and access control should then be built on top of it, whether at the application layer or the Layer 2 level—that is where the customizability should reside.”

Source link