Ethereum as “Productive Money”: Vivek Raman of Etherealize Breaks Down the Institutional Thesis

Episode notes

In this episode of The Smart Economy Podcast, host Dylan Grabowski sits down with Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, an organization focused on helping institutions work with Ethereum and integrate blockchain-based systems into existing financial operations. The conversation centers on a shift that has taken years to build: institutions moving from internal pilots to actual deployment. Raman walks through his path from trading structured credit products at firms like Morgan Stanley and UBS to working in crypto. His entry point into Ethereum came from a practical angle. Traditional systems handle large volumes of value but rely on layers of intermediaries, delayed settlement, and siloed data. Ethereum offered a different model: a shared infrastructure where assets, payments, and logic can exist in the same environment.