On the evening of the 19th in the East 8th time zone, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman posted on X to “mourn” the departure of the longest-serving Ethereum Foundation researcher, Dankrad Feist, who chose to leave Ethereum and join the stablecoin L1, Tempo.
David Hoffman believes that the issue of profit-driven companies absorbing talents cultivated by the Ethereum open-source community should not be underestimated, and claims that these companies will not bring greater benefits to Ethereum as they claim.
David Hoffman bluntly stated, “In my view, the purpose of Tempo is to intercept the trillions of dollars in stablecoins expected to flow in over the next decade and place them on their private blockchain. Of course, this will make the pie bigger, but Tempo still intends to take as much of the pie as possible.” He believes that Tempo will inevitably be constrained by compliance issues, and even issuing tokens will not solve this. Although both Tempo and Ethereum will bring change to the world, only Ethereum is best suited to be the trusted, neutral global settlement layer, with no shareholders and not subject to legal constraints.
The “disappointment” with Ethereum began when its price performance started lagging behind bitcoin in this cycle, but over time, people began to realize that the exodus of top talent from the Ethereum community seems to have become an irreversible trend. When dreams and interests conflict, many people ultimately choose the latter, which is exactly what many in the industry have long worried about…
Dankrad Feist is Not the First, Nor Will He Be the Last On the 17th of this month, Dankrad Feist announced on X that he would join Tempo, while continuing to serve as a research advisor for three strategic plans of the Ethereum Foundation protocol cluster (scaling L1, scaling Blob, and improving user experience). Dankrad Feist stated, “Ethereum has strong values and technical choices that make it unique.
Tempo will be a great complement, built on similar technologies and values, while being able to push the boundaries in scale and speed. I believe this will greatly benefit Ethereum. Tempo’s open-source technology easintereing into Etherentely be reintely.” According to LinkedIn, Dankrad Feist officially became an Ethereum researcher in 2019, mainly researching sharding technology to scale the Ethereum mainnet.
The most core part of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, Danksharding, is named after him. Danksharding is a key technical path for Ethereum to achieve high throughput and low-cost transactions, and is widely regarded by the community as the most important upgrade direction after “Ethereum 2.0”. Dankrad Feist promoted the pre-version of Danksharding, Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844), which introduced the blob transaction type, providing a cheaper and more efficient data availability layer for Rollups, significantly reducing the data publishing cost for Rollups.
In addition, he once had a public debate with Geth development lead Péter Szilágyi over the MEV issue, which eventually prompted Vitalik to step in and coordinate, raising community awareness of MEV mitigation mechanisms such as PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation). Tempo researcher Mallesh Pai introduced the new Tempo team members in September, including former OP Labs CEO and ETHGlobal co-founder Liam Horne.
Before Dankrad Feist, the industry was “surprised” by Danny Ryan, who co-founded Etherealize, which raised $40 million. As a former core member of the Ethereum Foundation known as the “Ethereum 2.0 Chief Engineer,” he announced his indefinite departure in September 2024, only to join Etherealize six months later. However, since Etherealize is similar in nature to ConsenSys, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin who left 11 years ago over commercialization disputes, Danny Ryan’s move was understood by most people.