Stripe-backed Tempo Hires Ethereum Researcher Dankrad Feist After $500M Funding

Strike:- In a move towards accelerating its tech end development, Stripe and Paradigm backed payments chain Tempo has added one of Ethereum’s most visible researchers to its roster.

On Friday, Dankrad Feist, a longtime developer and researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced he will join the Tempo project while remaining an adviser to some Ethereum research efforts. The hire comes as Tempo Tempo raised $500 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, valuing the payments-focused network at $5 billion, according to Fortune report.

In a short announcement on X, Feist said he was “excited” to join Tempo and framed the move as a continuation of work to make high-scale, practical blockchains that preserve permissionless ideals. He also signalled he will keep a research advisory relationship with parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, including work on scaling features and UX improvements.

Dankrad has been an excellent researcher and has made immensely valuable contributions to the Ethereum that we know and love today, including Danksharding, consensus research and much more. Wishing him luck in his new efforts. https://t.co/dlSwu3fpen

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 17, 2025

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Ethereum Researcher Joins Tempo

Introduced by Strike founder Patrick Collison on September, Patrick describe the aim of developing Tempo clearly: make stablecoins and high-volume dollar rails fast, cheap and predictable for merchants and treasuries.

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin after Feist’s Tempo joining news shared his work on scaling proposals. David Feist has most prominently worked on Danksharding and other pieces of the network’s long-term throughput roadmap. His research footprint and technical credibility make the appointment notable as Tempo, the permissionless-but-payments-first chain aims at reducing settlement friction for stablecoins and merchant flows.

Stripe-owned startup Bridge is also seeking a national bank trust charter to comply with the Genius Act. The company recently also compeleted adding its infrastructure partners as well – from MetaMask, Privy, Alchemy, Chaianalysis among others. Now, adding Feist is an explicit signal that Tempo wants deep protocol expertise to make it par with leading players like Solana and Ethereum.

Today, @Stablecoin submitted its application for organizing a national trust bank to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The charter would allow Bridge to operate under a unified federal framework consistent with the GENIUS Act.

Through this bank, we’ll provide:…

— Zach (@zcabrams) October 14, 2025

Era of Stablecoin-focused Chains

As the faith in stablecoin-powered global payment mechanism grows, Tempo isn’t the only chain oriented around stablecoins and payments.  Patrick and his chain Tempo is directly bidding in the space along with big issuers – with Circle working on Arc and Tether rapidly developing its Plasma and Stable chain projects.

Circle unveiled Arc 1 month before Stripe’s announcement of Tempo. It introduced the idea of Arc as an open Layer-1 engineered for stablecoin finance (USDC as native gas, dollar-denominated fees). Currently, it is running alliance/webinar outreach and testnet activity as it staffs up for production.

On the other hand, Tether’s Plasma has already pushed into mainnet beta in September 2025. It launched with an aggressive liquidity bootstrap – with more than $2 billion of stablecoin liquidity and a native token (XPL) at launch. In terms of product moves, it has also introduced Plasma One aimed at instant, near-zero-fee USDT transfers. The emphasis across the three stablecoin-focused chains remains same: making stablecoin transfers instant and with low fees.

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