Ethereum faces an identity crisis. Your native token, Ethher (eth), has a lower performance Against competitors, and lifelong builders begin to question whether chain technology is staying behind, and if their community is losing the approach.
The Ethereum Foundation, the non -profit organization that Stewards Ethereum’s Development has been guilty for many of the network struggles. The Vitalik Bterin co -founder is leading a massive leadership shake in the organization, but its central influence on the process has caused its own controversy.
Meanwhile, rival ecosystems like Solana are taking advantage of uncertainty, attracting talent to the fullest and surpassing ETH in the market.
In the midst of this turbulence, a new project, Etherealize, aims to take ETH to Wall Street. Founded by former banker Vivek Raman, Etherealize seeks to close the gap between traditional finances and Ethereum, positioning ETH as a class of serious assets.
Raman, who spent a decade in banking before discovering cryptography, believes that his history of traditional finance gives him a unique perspective. It has spent the last four years establishing the bases for Etherealize, choosing to launch in January, a moment of elevated market optimism promoted by the expectations of a white house friendly with cryptography, even when Ethereum lidia with internal disputes and pricing disputes.
In a recent interview with Coindesk, Raman discussed his vision for ETH and the broader cryptographic landscape, which includes:
• Your trip to Ethereum and the Etherealize foundation.
• How Etherealize is marketing eth a wall street.
• The role of the Ethereum Foundation and the opinions of the banks on the rolls of layer 2.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You have had all this experience in traditional finance, and you are called newly arrived in the world of Ethereum. Walk through how you got into cryptography, what was that moment?
Raman: I was a merchant of four banks, trading the most archaic and esoteric products: high -performance bonds, bonds in difficulties, leverage loans and swaps and things for credit breach. These are all the columns of the economy, but I saw how inefficient they are.
When you watch the movie Financial WorldAnd you see everything marketed by phone, you are like, “Oh, maybe the system is updated”, but it has not done so. It is still quoted like this.
I saw it for 10 years. I lived it. And I am very lucky because I built a really good network, I have all these incredible mentors, all these people who directed banks and handled desks.
But after 10 years, the technological rhythm of Wall Street was not evolving at all, and I said: “Let me find something else.”
Just when I left Wall Street, I went to Austin, Texas, and met some of Ethereum’s central developers in the research and development team. They were working on the merger and taught me about Ethereum.
While I was on Wall Street, it was very anticipated due to regulators. The “adoption moment” was not even close during the 10 years I was there. But when I found Ethereum, I realized that this was the answer for Wall Street.
There are different components to eteteize, right? Where does the “marketing” part enter?
Raman: Then there are three interrelated things.
The first thing is that everyone uses Ethereum; Ethereum is the most adopted smart contract platform. Bitcoiners only talk about Bitcoins, probably because there is not much use, so all you can do is talk about it.
It is almost like with Ethereum, there is so much use that nobody really talks about the ETH asset. But the asset is very important for the ecosystem; For better or worse, people use assets as proxy for ecosystem health. Part of the reason why I think Solana has much of the Care Center is not because it is necessarily the best technology; It is because the Token rose a lot.
So, the first thing is to talk about Ether as an asset, as a portfolio diversifier, as something complementary to Bitcoin, and provide that content, research and marketing to ETF emitters, to the broader public and institutions.
The second is that Ethereum is obviously a utility platform. It is this new financial Internet; They call it “the operating system for the financial economy.” So we teach about Ethereum as a platform and what it can do with it: it can tokenize assets. You can build layer 2 ecosystems, where banks can have their own networks and can customize them to take their customers to the chain.
And then, third, we really try to call action. The call to action is to token assets in Ethereum or build a layer 2 in Ethereum, and we are building a product suite to facilitate Wall Street trade in the Ethereum block chain.
Ethereum is experiencing an identity crisis. Its price is far from other cryptocurrencies, the Ethereum Foundation is experiencing a shake and the members of the cryptographic community are expressing their disagreements about the central role of Vitalik Buterin in the ecosystem. Etherealize is coming to fruition at a time when the ecosystem will probably need a marketing or defense arm. Is Wall Street the Savior of Ethereum?
Raman: I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. The Ethereum Foundation should not have to do everything, and Vitalik shouldn’t have to do everything. Research and Development, and the high -level and avant -garde strategy and the road map to Ethereum to the future proof for the next 100 years, that is the work of Vitalik.
Who is the role to talk about these ecosystems? It is the application layer. They are institutions like Etherealize.
The problem is that once the Overton window changed the regulatory attacks on regulatory acceptance, the other ecosystems of the CAPA-1, which have very centralized and centrally planned companies behind them, collected mental sharing and participation in the market of marketing. But ultimately, the best thing about the best is Vitalik: the best thing is the best EF researchers.
I spent years developing this business plan, discovering when the right time to attack was. I obtained a Vitalik firm and EF: they gave us a small subsidy to start starting last August. But I did a lot of due diligence. I surveyed many institutions and asked if this was the time. And it was.
You have discussed the role of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). Some believe that the Foundation is in charge of executing the ecosystem. How do you divide the roles between EF and Etherealize?
Raman: The EF has a great marketing people, there is only much to do.
We have all this Capos-2 ecosystem that need coordination. One of the people in the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation always says: “Ethereum does not have a commercial development arm, it has thousands of business development weapons”, which are all applications, layer 2s, etc.
We are here to act as a duct for all the different applications and two. And we have access to people who really want to use Ethereum: the players and institutions of Wall Street.
We go from side to another [with the EF] all the time. We have the best relationship with them, but we are in the long term of them. I see all this as a very positive sum.
You bring layer networks 2. How do you see Wall Street? We know that Deutsche Bank is launching a Zksync layer 2, and UBS has also expressed interest in the use of Layer-2 technology. But what is your point of view from what you have seen?
Raman: I think it will be very ironic when people look back to criticism that the two are of extractive and dilutive value. I think Wall Street sees layer two as an opportunity.
One of the many reasons why I think Ethereum will win other layers-1 is because he doubled in the layer map of layer 2 and realized that everyone does not belong to a uniform chain.
There are different companies, different countries and different states. Everyone has their own culture. You cannot fill everything in one place with a set of rules.
Wall Street sees this as an opportunity. Where is the place where you can earn the most money and applications implementation money? It is in layer 2. In the application layer, you can control your personalization and privacy level. In layer 2, you can have knowledge characteristics (KYC). All that will be extremely critical.
Why has Wall Street been contained? Was it really only the aspect of regulatory clarity, which has now changed that there is a new administration in Washington?
Raman: I think that regulatory clarity is the correct answer, but it may be too simplistic.
I think the real problem is that there were no economic incentives for Wall Street institutions to really use blockchains. Many of them saw blockchains as competitors or threatening. There was no way to earn money using blockchains, especially with an oppressive regulatory regime.
With the change in the regulations and the expansion of technology such as CAPA-2, Wall Street can now earn a lot of money using blockchains, specifically in Ethereum, building the CAPA-2 and executing assets in them. They can earn a lot of money now, so everyone rushes. It is because they smell like the opportunity.
Read more: Ethereum Vitalik Buterin is offended in the midst of a great leadership shake
