Full disclosure: I work at N3XT (a chartered US bank) and wrote both of these.
Wrote some articles that I hope causes readers to think more about the real utility of public blockchains and specifically Ethereum. Happy to post links to articles but the post will get autorm'd can drop in comments if people are interested
The first piece highlights the subtle, perhaps largely unrealized, benefit for a bank to use an open standard, on a decentralized public utility as a way to benefit its clients, itself, and Ethereum
Second is a thought experiment pricing what it would cost to run our entire bank ledger on public Ethereum L1 vs a private chain vs a traditional banking core for a $10B bank:
* Legacy core: ~$149k/mo ($0.59/tx)
* Public Ethereum L1: ~$36k/mo ($0.14/tx)
* Private Ethereum: ~$31k/mo ($0.12/tx)
TL;DR
A traditional core is the most expensive way to run our ledger at every size we modeled, and not by a little. That gap never closes anywhere on the curve, which should tell you nobody buys a core for the price.
Between public and private blockchains, it's close at our scale and a landslide above it. We model Ethereum L1 directly, not Layer 2s, because rollups do not yet match the decentralization, censorship resistance, or sovereign consensus of mainnet. At Regional bank level, private wins by 13% and the entire margin is less than a quarter of an engineer’s salary. Move our staffing assumption from 0.75 FTE to 1.0 and public wins instead. But at Money Center bank level private wins by 83%, because gas and signing are metered and a private fleet isn't. Every transaction you add is free on one and billed on the other.
The tiebreaker is time. Gas is the only input in this model that gets cheaper, falling somewhere between 20% and 64% a year depending on whether you trust the published Ethereum roadmap or the last five years of history. Everything else moves the other way. Salaries rise, vendor contracts renew upward, and nobody's core gets cheaper at renewal.
Ethereum set out to be a "world computer." As throughput climbs and execution costs continue to collapse, you can start to see a future where public rails displace both legacy core vendors and private cloud fleets alike. That was the original promise of cloud computing: paying strictly and exclusively for what you actually use. Cloud platforms and core vendors answer to shareholders who demand expanding margins, annual price escalators, and locked-in enterprise minimums. Ethereum’s incentive is structurally aligned in reverse: driving unit execution costs down to maximize volume and global network adoption. It becomes the true realization of pay-as-you-go utility computing.
Of course, cost is only one hurdle: public rails still require lower latency and privacy before an institutional bank can migrate live customer ledgers. But on cost alone, we'd have been fine starting on public rails, and we'd probably be better off there within five years. We didn't rent the ledger, but we may yet.