Ethereum core dev Dankrad Feist joins Stripe-backed stablecoin project

Longtime Ethereum developer developer Dankrad Feist announced he will join Tempo

by Blockworks /

October 17, 2025 10:54 am

Juan Roballo/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

Dankrad Feist, a longtime Ethereum researcher and core developer, announced Friday that he is joining Tempo, the blockchain project backed by Stripe and Paradigm.

Feist, who joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2019, has played a key role in advancing data availability and sharding research. He stated that while leaving his full-time Ethereum role, he will remain a research advisor to EF protocol initiatives.

Tempo, backed by Stripe and Paradigm, aims to build a blockchain optimized for payments and real-world integration. Feist described Tempo as a “complement” to Ethereum and that the new project could later feed its open-source technology back into the Ethereum ecosystem.

Newsletter

Subscribe to The Breakdown

“Tempo’s open-source technology can easily integrate back into Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem,” Feist wrote. “ Ethereum and Tempo are strongly aligned, as they are built with the same permissionless ideals in mind. I am looking forward to staying involved with the community and continuing to push Ethereum forward!”

Feist had previously taken on an advisory role for EigenLayer, an Ethereum staking protocol, but later stepped down amid concerns about conflicts of interest.

The Tempo payments-centric initiative is currently in private testnet. According to Paradigm, the project has drawn design input from major firms like OpenAI, DoorDash, Deutsche Bank and others.

“We are excited to further crypto’s ability to tackle real-world use cases including global payments and payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement, embedded financial accounts, microtransactions, agentic payments, and more,” Paradigm said in September.

This is a developing story.

This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by editor Jeffrey Albus before publication.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.

Tags

Newsletter

The Breakdown

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Digital Asset Summit 2026

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

buy tickets learn more

recent research

Research

The Privacy Primitive: FHE Comes to Mainnet

Fully homomorphic encryption is emerging as the leading cryptographic approach to onchain confidentiality, enabling computation directly on encrypted data without exposure. We are constructive on FHE as a category and Zama as the clear leader, though the 1,000x+ computational overhead and hardware dependency represent material execution risks that make throughput scaling the key variable for valuation.

by Daniel Shapiro