Dankrad Feist, a longtime Ethereum developer and researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced Friday that he’s joining Tempo, a layer-1 blockchain for payments and stablecoins built by Stripe and Paradigm.
Feist said he will remain as a “research adviser” at the Ethereum Foundation to provide input on scaling the layer-1 network, improving user experience (UX), and blobs, a feature of the Ethereum network that frees up blockspace by temporarily storing data. He added:
“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.
I am looking forward to staying involved with the community and continuing to push Ethereum forward,” he said. Cointelegraph reached out to Feist but was unable to receive a response by the time of publication.
The announcement drew mixed reactions from the Ethereum community, with some sending messages of support and others seeing it as a loss of one of the Ethereum ecosystem’s most significant contributors during a year of significant change for the ecosystem.
Related: Ethereum Foundation converts 1,000 ETH for stablecoins to fund R&D, grants
Crypto community divided on Stripe’s Tempo blockchain
The crypto community also remains divided regarding the Tempo blockchain and whether a payments-focused, dedicated stablecoin blockchain network is even needed.
“No one 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 is “no need for yet another chain.”
Ethereum Foundation researcher Devansh Mehta also questioned the decision to launch Tempo as a purpose-built blockchain instead of just becoming an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network.
App-specific layer-1 chains that must build out their own validator set suffer from centralization issues and could face increased legal liability, Mehta said.
The debate comes amid a time of tension between Ethereum and its many layer-2 scaling solutions, which some have characterized as cannibalizing Ethereum’s base layer revenue and a downward force on Ether’s (ETH) price despite bringing user traffic to the ecosystem.
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