Talent is leaving, debt is accumulating: Ethereum's dual-layer concerns are taking shape

Author: Eric, Foresight News

Original Title: Ethereum's "Dual Crisis": Core Talent Continues to Leave, Technical Debt Quietly Accumulates

On the evening of the 19th (East 8th District time), Bankless co-founder David Hoffman posted on X to "mourn" the departure of Ethereum Foundation's longest-serving researcher, Dankrad Feist, who chose to leave Ethereum and join stablecoin L1 Tempo.

David Hoffman believes that the issue of profit-driven companies absorbing talent nurtured 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 cake bigger, but Tempo still intends to take as much of the cake as possible." He believes that Tempo will be restricted by compliance issues regardless, 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 to lag behind bitcoin in this cycle, but as time went on, people began to realize that the exodus of top talent from the Ethereum community seemed to have become an irreversible trend. When dreams and interests conflict, many 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 be joining 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 technology and values, while pushing the boundaries of scale and speed. I believe this will greatly benefit Ethereum. Tempo's open-source technology can be easily 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. Currently, one of the core parts 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 ultimately 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 members who joined Tempo 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 received $40 million in funding. 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 and joined Etherealize just six months later. However, since Etherealize is similar in nature to ConsenSys, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, who left 11 years ago due to 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 also 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 deep technical dependencies on a VC that plays with such high-level strategic maneuvers. After the FTX collapse, Paradigm almost deleted all crypto-related branding and made a high-profile pivot to AI. Carrone believes this alone proves his point.

After Trump returned to the White House, Paradigm returned to the Web3 space, aggressively recruiting top community researchers, funding key open-source libraries for Ethereum, and supporting Stripe in launching Tempo. Carrone believes that although Paradigm claims that everything they do is beneficial to Ethereum—more funding, more tools, more testbeds, and new ideas that can feed back into Ethereum, all of which are indeed potential benefits—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 worth being highly vigilant.

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

In the comments, some users questioned why effort should be spent on improving and upgrading Solidity instead of just maintaining it for stability and security. The original poster explained that even if the Solidity compiler is changed, it will not affect any deployed contracts, but it can improve security, enhance the development experience, or support the use of new contracts. As shown in the image above, it was from the beginning of the last bull market that development activity began to decline sharply.

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 technology are downsizing, so the iteration of cutting-edge technology may eventually depend on only a few companies; as the Gas Limit increases, many execution clients have not made substantial performance improvements, and judging from the repositories, the development teams of these clients seem to be 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 many dependent libraries and surrounding repositories are already stagnant. The entire ecosystem continues to expand, guarding tens of billions of dollars in assets, while some of its foundations are quietly eroding."

The open-source community cannot simply 'run on love'

For an open-source community like Ethereum, which carries a large amount of real, calculable value, balancing "running on love" and economic incentives is an issue with no precedent. For the Ethereum Foundation, this should have been a highly important issue, 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 the excessive influence of Vitalik and a small group around him over 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 re-employment. Afterwards, the Ethereum Foundation even offered to pay Péter Szilágyi $5 million to have Geth spin off from the Foundation, but he refused. Currently, Péter Szilágyi still maintains the Geth codebase as an independent contributor.

Rumors of internal corruption within the Ethereum Foundation are endless, but this is actually a problem that should have been foreseen 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 achieved 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 the infrastructure, with a permissionless open-source spirit at its core, and fueled by the commercialization brought by many enterprises. But such a massive system requires a large number of people just to maintain it, 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 effect. 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 still persist for ideals become disheartened.