Ethereum Foundation Researcher’s Pivot Highlights Growing Cultural Divide in Crypto

On Friday, Ethereum Foundation Researcher Dankrad Feist announced he will be joining the stablecoin-focused blockchain startup Tempo, which was incubated via a partnership between fintech giant Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm. In response, some of the crypto purists on social media, most notably and understandably those who build on Ethereum, shared their disappointment, while others simply saw it as a sign of the times in terms of where the industry is headed more generally.

Dankrad leaving Ethereum is a terrible look for open-source vs. corporate blockchains.

Huge L for the entire community tbh

— Andy (@ayyyeandy) October 17, 2025

The reaction to this recent move by Feist is an illustration of the greater cultural divide that has been growing in crypto over the past few years as more of this technology is built around increasingly centralized vectors of control. While Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin whitepaper and other early writings discussed the need for a new system built on “cryptographic proof instead of trust” and the problems with traditional systems being related to “all the trust that’s required to make it work,” much of the more recent activity in crypto has involved centrally-issued stablecoins as poker chips in a meme coin casino.

Big Tech Taking Over Crypto?

Much of the growth around crypto networks like Ethereum has been centered around centralized stablecoins, which operated in somewhat of a legal grey area in the U.S. prior to the passage of the GENIUS Act earlier this year. With greater regulatory clarity established around these digital dollars, there has been an increase in various developments around so-called “stablechains,” which are focused on these bank-backed dollar tokens rather than crypto-native, permissionless assets.

A fundamental problem with ETH valuation is that ethereum's primary uses cases are largely external to ETH's market value. Ethereum can be very useful, its apps can garner great revenue, and ETH can still be low price — or vice versa — there is little link between them. OTOH,…

— Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) October 7, 2025

Circle and Tether are the two largest stablecoin issuers via their respective USDC and USDT tokens. Earlier this year, Circle announced the creation of their own layer-one blockchain called Arc. Additionally, Tether and its affiliates have supported the development of at least two blockchains where USDT is the native gas token, namely Stable and Plasma.

More well-known players in the fintech industry are also getting involved, with Coinbase, Stripe (Tempo), PayPal, and Robinhood all either announcing or already having launched their own blockchain platforms or other expansions into the crypto market. Google Cloud and Cloudflare also have their own blockchain offerings at different stages of development that are focused on payments for artificial intelligence agents. Some of these platforms are being built as secondary layers on top of Ethereum, while others are completely separate blockchain networks.

Cypherpunk Use Cases Aren’t Popular

As big tech giants and other notable players get involved in building out their own blockchain networks where they can have more control and extract more value, the cypherpunk values Satoshi wanted to infuse into Bitcoin, such as privacy and censorship resistance, have struggled to gain the hearts and minds of the general public. Sure, the bitcoin price recently hit a new all-time high once again (before subsequently dropping more than 15%); however, much of the recent bull run has been built around centralized, regulated financial products such as the publicly-traded exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from the likes of BlackRock and bitcoin treasury companies such as Strategy.

There are still pockets of activity in crypto that are relatively faithful to the Satoshi vision. Not all use cases reintroduce trusted third parties by building everything around centralized stablecoins or throw away privacy by putting too much financial data on public blockchains. This is becoming an increasingly smaller percentage of overall activity, however, when compared to speculation on dubious token offerings or further empowering financial institutions with new technology that allows them to avoid strict anti-money laundering regulations as long as they put their customers on a database they call a blockchain.

Bitcoin itself has remained somewhat resistant to corporate influence at the protocol level, as shown by the resolution of its internal block size war back in 2017. However, Ethereum’s reliance on stablecoins is becoming an increasingly hard-to-ignore issue that is worth watching, as the issuers of these tokens have an incentive to use their centralized point of control to extract as much value as possible from this technology.

As seen by the recent “stablechain” phenomenon, this may include a desire to cut the open Ethereum network out of the picture entirely. Contrastly, Bitcoin’s main problematic point of centralization in terms of third-party custodians still requires those custodians to use the Bitcoin network.

While people are still able to use these technologies in the permissionless, non-custodial manner Satoshi originally intended, the crypto industry as a whole is increasingly turning into a way for centralized financial entities to empower themselves rather than individual users.