Dankrad Feist, a longtime Ethereum developer and researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced on Friday that he is joining Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain for payments and stablecoins built by Stripe and Paradigm.

Feist said he will remain a “research advisor” to 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 block space by temporarily storing data. Added:

“Tempo’s open source technology can be easily integrated with Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem. Ethereum and Tempo are strongly related because they are built with the same permissionless ideals.

I look forward to staying involved in the community and continuing to grow Ethereum,” he said. Cointelegraph reached out to Feist but had not received a response by press time.

The announcement sparked mixed reactions from the Ethereum community, with some sending out the news support, and others see it as a loss one of the most significant contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem in a year of significant changes in the ecosystem.

Related: The Ethereum Foundation converts 1,000 ETH into stablecoins to fund research and development and grants

Cryptocurrency community divided over Stripe’s Tempo blockchain

The cryptocurrency community also remains divided over the Tempo blockchain and whether a dedicated payments-focused blockchain network is even needed.

“Nobody wants another network” – Joe Petrich, head of engineering at the non-fungible NFT platform Courtyard, he said in response to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison’s Tempo announcement, adding that “there is no need to create another network.”

Ethereum Foundation researcher Devansh Mehta, too questioned the decision to launch Tempo as a purpose-built blockchain rather than simply becoming an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling network.

Application-specific Layer 1 chains that must build their own set of validators face centralization issues and may face greater legal liability, Mehta he said.

The debate comes amid tensions between Ethereum and its many Layer 2 scaling solutions, which some have characterized as cannibalizing Ethereum’s base layer revenues and influencing the price of Ethereum (ETH) despite increasing user traffic to the ecosystem.

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