A version of this article appeared in our The Decentralised newsletter on October 21. Sign up here.

Last week, Ethereum lost one of its top researchers, Dankrad Feist.

Feist left for Tempo, a blockchain being built by payment processor Stripe and crypto venture firm Paradigm.

“While payments used to be front and centre in the early days of crypto, I see a special opportunity to finally achieve this ambitious goal,” Feist wrote on X.

The Ethereum community was blindsided. Feist’s partial departure — he will continue to advise the Ethereum Foundation — led to a fair amount of hand–wringing and finger–pointing.

After all, it’s not the first high-profile loss for the world’s largest blockchain.

Last year, researcher Max Resnick left for Solana’s development firm, Anza. He and Feist have both been advocates for scaling the Ethereum mainnet, something that has become a priority for the new leadership at the Ethereum Foundation.

Geth founder and former Foundation employee Péter Szilágyi seemingly waded into the debate over the weekend when he shared a letter on social media he sent the organisation’s leadership last year.

Among other things, he dinged the Foundation for underpaying employees.

Szilágyi said he’d only made a little more than $100,000 per year working there, before taxes — a modest salary for a software engineer.

“Almost all the initial employees of the Foundation have left long ago as that was the only reasonable way to actually have a compensation proportional to the value being created,” he wrote.

“Some people remained, and I feel the Foundation overly abused the fact that some people were in this for principles, not for the money.”

He’s not alone in voicing those concerns. More recently, a Protocol Guild survey found that software developers who work to maintain and improve the Ethereum blockchain earn a median salary of $140,000, below Coinbase employees’ base salary of $150,000.

As for the finger-pointing, some gently admonished Tempo co-creator Paradigm for poaching top Ethereum talent to staff a competing project, a “corpo-chain.”

“The goal of Paradigm and many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem, while also adding value to the ecosystem in the service of maximizing their own gains,” Consensys founder Joe Lubin said.

But it’s not all bad, said the Ethereum co-founder.

“That said, I don’t believe there is reason for concern,” Lubin added. “The gold rush of corpo-chains is validating for the traditional economy and signals our mainstreaming.”

Top DeFi stories of the week

This week in DeFi governance

VOTE: Arbitrum DAO votes on algorithmic delegate incentive system

VOTE: Aave DAO considers Certora as security partner for v4

VOTE: GMX DAO votes to fund Solana expansion

Post of the week

Lost amid all the Feist-y (sorry) drama was Tempo’s acquisition of Ithaca, a company Paradigm started last year with a $20 million investment.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. Got a tip? Email at aleks@dlnews.com.