Ethereum reckons with Dankrad Feist’s move to Tempo
Praise from EF leaders, warnings from skeptics — and a community deciding whether this is a threat or a forcing function
Anton Derbushev/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
Ethereum just lost one of its most prolific researchers, Dankrad Feist, to Tempo — the Stripe/Paradigm co-production that’s building a purpose-built EVM chain for payments.
The move has reignited debate in the Ethereum community: Is a venture-owned, EVM-compatible chain a threat to Ethereum mainnet and talent pool — or a healthy forcing function that clarifies what Ethereum should (and shouldn’t) chase?
On Monday, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin weighed in with a measured counterpoint, arguing that venture capital both extracts and contributes, and reaffirming Ethereum’s position as the “rigorously decentralized, credibly neutral” base layer.
Prominent Ethereum Foundation voices, from Vitalik Buterin on down, have been united in praise for Feist. Others worry about the growing gravitational pull of “corpo-chains” and their potential to poach both talent and users.
What happens next is key: Will Tempo evolve into a proving ground that strengthens Ethereum, or a parallel system that siphons value away?
The departure
Backing up: On Friday, Feist announced he’s joining Tempo while staying on as a research advisor to the Ethereum Foundation. His note framed Tempo as aligned with Ethereum’s values and suggested open-source work could flow back upstream.
The EF messaging around the move smells of a concerted effort to download its impact. Everyone from Vitalik Buterin to a range of core developers offered kudos.
“Dankrad has been an excellent researcher and has made immensely valuable contributions to the Ethereum that we know and love today, including Danksharding, consensus research and much more,” Buterin said on X, wishing Feist well.
Other prominent EF voices Barnabé Monnot, Ansgar Dietrichs and Alex Stokes praised Dankrad’s contributions, with Stokes calling it an “opportunity for Ethereum and Tempo to be closer together.”
Within hours, the conversation expanded — from one career move to first principles: What should Ethereum optimize for, as venture-backed chains sprint toward payments?
VC heavyweights vs. credible neutrality
Lubin’s intervention today stood out for both tone and specificity.
In his words, “the goal of [Paradigm] and many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem, while also adding value to the ecosystem in the service of maximizing their own gains,” and calling the hiring “natural and inevitable.”
His conclusion was a restatement of Ethereum’s mission — to be a “rigorously decentralized, credibly neutral digital asset settlement ledger infrastructure.”
That’s something corporate chains can never be, and therefore they aren’t existential threats, but complementary.
“Corpo-chains will be important infrastructure built on top of neutral permissionless chains,” Lubin said.
Bankless’ David Hoffman has doubts about the supposed synergy Feist promises. “I’d like to hear the leadership at Tempo elaborate on that further, because I’m not buying it,” Hoffman said.
The hinge of his argument is sovereignty: If a corporate L1 captures the “incoming flow of trillions of dollars of stablecoins,” the value accrues there first. He also points to Ethereum’s special regulatory positioning: “Only Ethereum and Bitcoin, and – maybe if you squint – a few other chains, operate above the law – anyone’s law.”
Yes, Tempo may — and probably will — “grow the pie,” but will any of that growth route to Ethereum’s settlement, security and culture, or redound to ETH’s benefit?
Don’t race Tempo on payments
A cluster of voices argues Ethereum shouldn’t try to compete with the Tempos of the world head on. Nick Almond, for instance, suggested a return to Ethereum’s roots: “It needs to become the cypherpunk chain.”
Its unique selling point, 0xBreadguy agrees, is that, “there will never be a chain more decentralized, credibly neutral and censorship resistant and live as Ethereum.”
In other words, let TradFi have their permissioned playground. Differentiation is good. If payments at scale require speed, distribution, and regulatory alignment that Ethereum won’t or can’t offer, the play is to double down on what only Ethereum is uniquely positioned to deliver, all while scaling on its own terms.
On this view, Tempo is a productive sandbox, argues GregTheGreek, who sketched a “Kusama thesis” for the chain, referring to the Polkadot “canary network.”
“Reth will become extremely feature rich, all the EIPs we want but can’t get, batteries included.” He suggests that real-world load on a high-velocity venue could produce open-source contributions to the EVM that Ethereum can adopt.
“We need to accept they’ll be battle-testing every possible change, and prove (or disprove) the viability at scale,” Greg said.
But not everyone is so bullish. Follow the incentives 0xBreadguy says: “I do not believe in the ‘it’s all EVM bro’ narrative. Tempo, Avalanche, Binance, Monad et al will contribute ~0 value to $ETH.”
The dichotomy carries over to disparate views on Ethereum’s place in the sweep of technological change, and who chooses to work on it. Feist’s career move provoked Conor Svensson of Enscribe to reminisce, “the reason why I was first pulled into Ethereum, was that it reminded me of Linux.”
“Linux went on to power vast swaths of the internet, but it didn’t make everyone rich,” Svensson said. “However, to most of those working on it, financial motivations were never the primary reasons for working on what they were.”
Talent, compensation and retention
Even if one is not motivated solely by money, it’s a factor.
“Ethereum core devs aren’t paid well enough, imagine earning peanuts for maintaining and improving 400 billion $ protocol,” Ouranos Capital declared.
Not to worry. The Ethereum Foundation’s Tomasz Stańczak pointed to a recent Head of Talent hire to help attract world-class candidates — and better support both departures and returns. It’s a pragmatic acknowledgment: the competition for research talent is now an issue.
At the same time, Trent van Epps at the Protocol Guild flagged the pressure: “We likely have a counterfactual where top shelf talent never even considers core [developer roles] because of the [compensation] gap.” The Protocol Guild has been focused on this problem in recent years.
As far as Feist goes, no need to panic, Ethereum advocate DCinvestor said: “Change is healthy.”
“EF and Ethereum research and core dev jobs should not be for life,” he said, adding, “they should constantly cycle in new talent and supporting future leaders as they grow their skillset.”
The funding debate surfaced a spicy take from Monad founder Keone Hon, who proposed Ethereum should “put in a hard fork to add 0.25% annual inflation to fund research.”
Hoffman’s Bankless partner Ryan Sean Adams, poured cold water on that idea, saying it “will never happen,” because it “would be an arbitrary monetary policy change directed to a specific group of individuals — [a] vector for corruption — same as fiat.”
The ether supply growth rate has leveled off in the past year | Source: Blockworks Research
There’s the rub: Matching corporate compensation with protocol-level funding runs straight into Ethereum’s commitments to predictability and neutrality.
That’s where Lubin’s framing and the EF’s talent posture intersect. It’s not “Tempo vs Ethereum” so much as “incentives and culture vs churn.” The chain with the best combination of funding, mission and network effects can still win the hiring battles of the next decade.
Stripe’s distribution vs Ethereum’s moat
Tempo isn’t just well-funded, it presumably will have distribution. As Gabriel Shapiro noted: “If it can put a meaningful [percentage] of [Stripe’s volume] onchain, and also put a meaningful [percentage] of a few partners’ volumes onchain, it could quickly be rivaling Solana and Ethereum in volumes.” It’s a clean articulation of the “distribution is greater than product” thesis.
But that scale cuts both ways. “BIG IF,” countered William Mougayar, at the Ethereum Market Research Center. He argues that “payments is not a sweet spot for blockchains,” and that people “severely underestimate the switching costs and barriers to entry” — wallets, developer trust, tooling, nodes, clients, and culture — all part of Ethereum’s compounding moat.
The human capital moat matters too. As Gnosis’ Martin Köppelmann put it, “I am not worried about another L1. But yes, I am worried about a number of people who used to embody Ethereum, leaving.”
Troubling exit or healthy evolution?
From today’s vantage, it’s too early to declare Feist’s jumping ship for Tempo bullish or bearish for Ethereum. What’s clear is that the move forced Ethereum’s community to reassert what makes it special — and where it should or shouldn’t compete.
The most constructive stance may be to treat Tempo as both a competitor and a lab, useful for the mother ship, so long as it doesn’t outsource Ethereum’s identity to corporate governance.
There are many outstanding questions, and Tempo’s technical details are still scant.
Permissionless trend: Will Tempo move from PoA testnet to a permissionless validator set? Does Feist’s hiring increase the prospect of eventually moving to an Ethereum layer-2? (Blockworks reached out to Paradigm with questions, but they declined to comment beyond previous remarks.)
Upstreaming: Will EVM/Reth innovation beget useful EIPs or merged features on Ethereum L1?
Economic: Will there be any ETH-denominated flows that make “grow the pie” mean grow ETH too?
If yes, “exit” begins to look like “evolution,” a proving ground that helps Ethereum scale faster while preserving what only it can be. If not, Ethereum will view Tempo like Hoffman: “a privately-owned corpo-chain.”
Either way, Ethereum’s best move is to keep playing its own game: keep neutrality sacred, scale responsibly, and keep giving the best researchers a reason to stay.
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