Ethereum developers bring their talents to private enterprises

Original Title: "Ethereum Developers Bringing Their Talents to Private Enterprises"

Original Author: Eric, Foresight News

 

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 can easily be reintegrated into Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem."

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.

What truly worries David Hoffman are companies like Tempo and Paradigm. Well-known Ethereum developer Federico Carrone expressed a similar view, retweeting David Hoffman's post about Dankrad Feist joining Tempo, and stating that he has been saying for the past two years that Paradigm's influence within Ethereum could become a tail risk for the entire ecosystem.

Federico Carrone wrote that the sole goal of venture capital funds is to maximize returns for LPs, and Ethereum should not form a deep technical dependency on a VC playing with such high-level strategic tactics. After the FTX collapse, Paradigm almost deleted all crypto-related branding and shifted high-profile to AI. Carrone believes this alone is enough to prove his point.

After Trump returned to the White House, Paradigm returned to the Web3 field, aggressively recruiting top community researchers, funding key open-source libraries for Ethereum, and supporting Stripe in launching Tempo. Carrone believes that although Paradigm claims everything they do is beneficial for Ethereum—more funding, more tools, more testbeds, and new ideas that can feed back into Ethereum—these are indeed potential benefits, but when companies have too much visibility and influence over open-source projects, priorities shift from the community's long-term vision to corporate interests.

Ethereum's Technical Debt is Accumulating

The simple loss of talent from the Ethereum open-source community may not cause widespread concern, but if the loss of talent is accompanied by the accumulation of technical debt, it is cause for serious alarm.

A week ago, a community user posted a screenshot on X, stating that the top contributors to the Solidity language have almost stopped developing. Only Cameel continues to raise new issues and push technical progress, but it seems to be just in maintenance mode. He believes the community needs to invest more resources to support this programming language.

In the comments, some users questioned why energy should be spent on further improving and upgrading Solidity instead of just maintaining it for stability and security. The user who posted explained that even changing the Solidity compiler would not affect any deployed contracts, but could improve security, enhance the development experience, or support new contract usage. As shown in the image above, development activity began to decline sharply at the start of the last major bull market.

Federico Carrone also commented, saying that what worries him most is that many core tools and libraries built around Solidity may not receive long-term maintenance at all. Even the latest Solidity compiler is currently supported by only a handful of developers. In addition, companies related to L2 and ZK technologies are downsizing, so the iteration of cutting-edge technologies may end up relying on only a few companies; as the Gas Limit increases, many execution clients have not made substantial performance improvements, and from the libraries, it seems that these client development teams are falling behind.

Federico Carrone stated, "Ethereum's technical debt is constantly accumulating, not only because the protocol itself must continue to evolve, but also because a large number of dependent libraries and peripheral repositories are already stagnant. The entire ecosystem continues to expand, safeguarding tens of billions of dollars in assets, while some of its foundations are quietly eroding."

The Open-Source Community Cannot Rely Solely on 'Love and Passion'

For an open-source community like Ethereum, which carries a large amount of real, quantifiable value, balancing "love and passion" with economic incentives is a problem with no precedent. This should have been a highly important issue for the Ethereum Foundation, but it seems to have been overlooked.

Péter Szilágyi, who joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2015 and is responsible for Geth development and maintenance, pointed out three of his biggest disappointments in a letter to the Ethereum Foundation leadership a year and a half ago: being portrayed as a leader externally but marginalized internally; income being seriously disproportionate to Ethereum's market cap growth; and Vitalik and a small group around him having too much say in the Ethereum ecosystem.

At the end of 2024, Péter Szilágyi discovered that the Ethereum Foundation was secretly incubating an independent Geth fork team. He was later dismissed due to disputes with the Ethereum Foundation and repeatedly refused to be rehired. Afterwards, the Ethereum Foundation even offered to pay Péter Szilágyi $5 million to spin Geth out of the Foundation, but he refused. Péter Szilágyi still maintains the Geth codebase as an independent contributor.

Rumors of internal corruption within the Ethereum Foundation have been constant, but this is actually an issue that should have been anticipated from the moment the Ethereum Foundation was established. As the saying goes, "Where there are people, there are disputes." We cannot eliminate human greed, but we also cannot allow Ethereum to gradually lose its core values due to commercialization.

Ethereum has a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars and has supported trillions of dollars in on-chain value transfer over the years, based on professional technical teams building infrastructure, with the permissionless open-source spirit at its core, and driven by the commercialization brought by many enterprises. But maintaining such a huge system requires a large number of people, and as we have said, these people are leaving out of disappointment or choosing to join other projects for economic interests.

The Ethereum Foundation carried out drastic reforms this year, but so far, there has been no impressive result. Ethereum can still be called the world computer, and its potential for commercial applications is still being explored by brilliant teams one after another, but as the foundation of all this, Ethereum cannot continue to let those who persist for ideals become disheartened.