Prominent Ethereum developer Dankrad Feist departs EF to join stablecoin-focused Layer 1 Tempo

Prominent Ethereum developer Dankrad Feist is joining Tempo, the alternative, payments-focused Layer 1 being developed by Stripe and Paradigm.

“While payments used to be front and center in the early days of crypto, I see a special opportunity to finally achieve this ambitious goal with relentless execution on both the technical and distribution fronts,” Feist said in a statement on Friday.

Feist joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2018 as a part-time researcher and quickly rose in ranks. Perhaps most notably, Feist is known for co-creating the Danksharding sharding design to improve Layer 2 scalability.

Further, during the shakeup in the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership earlier this year, Feist was named as a strategic advisor across areas like L1 scaling and UX. Feist was known for his ambitious goals of improving the largest smart contract blockchain, including proposals like EIP-9698 to increase Ethereum’s gas limit 100-fold.

Feist’s departure has been taken as a blow to many in the Ethereum ecosystem. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, an ETH cheerleader, noted it is an “Incredible loss for Ethereum.”

“Tempo is built on Ethereum tech and now stacked with former Ethereum OGs – people who loved Ethereum but became somewhat jaded for one reason or another,” Ryan Sean Adams, another Bankless co-founder, said on X.

In late 2024, Feist and his EF colleague Justin Drake courted controversy when taking advisor positions at EigenLayer, which some deemed a possible conflict of interest. Both Feist and Drake later resigned and apologized, pledging to turn down future offers.

For his part, Feist noted that Tempo is a “great complement” to Ethereum and he plans to remain “involved with the community.”

“Ethereum has a strong set of values and technical choices that make it unique in the world,” Feist said. “Tempo’s open-source technology can easily integrate back into Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem. Ethereum and Tempo are strongly aligned, as they are built with the same permissionless ideals in mind.”

Tempo is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 “optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications” for companies like Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, and Shopify, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said when announcing the project.

“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. Wishing him luck in his new efforts,” Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said.