Dankrad Feist, a longtime Ethereum developer and researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced Friday that he is joining Tempo, a layer 1 blockchain for payments and stablecoins built by Stripe and Paradigm.
Feist said he will remain a “research advisor” to the Ethereum Foundation to help with Layer 1 network scaling, user experience (UX) improvement, and blobs, a feature of the Ethereum network that frees up block space by temporarily storing data. He added:
“Tempo’s open source technology can easily be integrated back into Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem. Ethereum and Tempo are strongly aligned, as they are built with the same permissionless ideals in mind.”
I look forward to remaining involved in the community and continuing to move Ethereum forward,” he said. Cointelegraph reached out to Feist but was unable to receive a response at the time of publication.
The announcement was met with mixed reactions from the Ethereum community, with some sending messages of support and others seeing it as a loss of one of the most important contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem during a year of significant change for the ecosystem.
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The crypto community divided on Stripe’s Tempo blockchain
The crypto community also remains divided regarding the Tempo blockchain and whether a dedicated, payments-focused stablecoin blockchain network is even necessary.
“Nobody wants another chain,” Joe Petrich, head of engineering at non-fungible token (NFT) platform Courtyard, said in response to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison’s Tempo announcement, adding that there was “no need for another chain.”
Devansh Mehta, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, also questioned the decision to launch Tempo as a purpose-built blockchain instead of simply becoming a layer 2 Ethereum scaling network.
Application-specific Layer 1 chains that must create their own set of validators suffer from centralization issues and could face increased legal liability, Mehta said.
The debate comes at a time of tension between Ethereum and its many layer 2 scaling solutions, which some have called cannibalizing Ethereum’s base layer revenue and putting a downward force on the price of Ether (ETH) despite bringing user traffic to the ecosystem.
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