Camila Russo & Olivia Capozzalo
October 21, 2025

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

The departure of a top Ethereum Foundation researcher released a pressure valve that put EF pay and culture on the spotlight

In other news:

BitMine buys over 200K ETH in a week
Meteora’s MET pre-market trades at $1B FDV
HumidiFi rises to the top among Solana DEXs
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We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today

📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$109,112	-1.76 %
Ethereum	$3,905.33	-3.25 %
BNB	$1,081.61	-3.09 %
XRP	$2.44	-0.51 %
Solana	$187.05	-2.67 %

Today’s Big Story

Ethereum’s Frugality Meets Its Reckoning

Dankrad Feist's departure from the Ethereum Foundation to join Tempo cracked open a pressure valve. The reaction was a mix of pride, anxiety, a little resentment, and a bigger conversation about whether Ethereum’s culture is built to keep its best people.

The Three Nerves Dankrad Exposed

Pay. Protocol Guild’s numbers suggest contributors earn 50–60% below market, as we reported in The Defiant.
Recognition. Who gets appreciated and amplified. Some devs say influence can hinge on being “appreciated by the EF” or orbiting Vitalik. Peter Szilágyi (Geth lead) put it starkly in a long reflection last year and reposted this week: he often felt like a “useful fool” and argued EF “set the protocol up for capture” by underpaying those most aligned, pushing them to seek outside incentives.
Finally, there’s the specter that other L1s, especially Tempo, could win. They’re moving fast, raising billions, have Stripe distribution and Paradigm backing. And why is Tempo winning more problematic for Ethereum than other L1s? It may be an EVM chain, but it’s a centralized and permissioned one.
Bankless’ David Hoffman captured the threat well, “As I see it, the reason why Tempo exists is to intercept the incoming flow of trillions of dollars of stablecoins predicted over the next decade, and put it on their privately-owned blockchain. Sure, it will grow the pie, but Tempo nonetheless intends to consume as much of that pie as possible.”

“Subtraction” Was a Feature Until It Became a Bug

For context, frugality is in Ethereum’s DNA. The EF nearly ran out of money in the early years; Ming Chan told me how, as EF Executive Director, she slashed costs and restructured the Ethereum organization. Vitalik set the tone by living out of a backpack, taking economy flights, and booking cheap hostels. Next, came Aya Miyaguchi, who codified a culture of subtraction: keep the EF hands-off so the ecosystem can diversify power and shine on its own.

That ethos helped Ethereum become a credibly neutral settlement layer. But if you subtract too much, you also subtract support, comp, comms, BD, clear paths for influence. The vacuum gets filled informally. That’s how “kingmaker” narratives take root.

“We set out to create a world of equal opportunity, yet the most successful projects are directly backed by the same 5–10 people… one happy friend circle of Vitalik,” said Szilágyi.

I don’t buy the strongest version of that claim and think Ethereum is meritocratic. But when people feel the feedback loop between delivery and influence is broken, they drift. As @fede_intern put it: “Ethereum… doesn’t reward delivery as much as it rewards other things… A system without an effective feedback loop… will face crises.”

That Invisible Hand

One cold take worth repeating: this is a market. The EF will rationally pay what it must to keep talent. And only* what it must. Many builders rationally accept less for prestige, mission, and the chance to work on the frontier. That equilibrium holds, until it doesn’t. Dankrad’s exit is a signal that non-monetary incentives aren’t sufficient anymore, for at least some of Ethereum’s top minds after years of grinding.

Even Joe Lubin agrees. VCs — “Paradigm is particularly good at this” — will extract and add value simultaneously. He’s sanguine: “This kind of behavior [is] natural and inevitable.” but at the same time, he says “Ethereum will win — already has won — its niche: rigorously decentralized, credibly neutral settlement.”

The fallout pulled in other long-simmering tensions. Sandeep Nailwal wrote that loyalty to Ethereum has been costly for Polygon and that the “Ethereum community… has been a shit show for quite some time,” with Polygon often denied “Ethereum beta” status. The EF’s Thomas Stanczak responded with a bridge-building note: Polygon has been a “massive force for good.”

So… Is Ethereum Under Serious Threat?

Short answer: Yes. More than ever. Competition is real, capital is coordinated, and so are marketing machines. But the core question is whether a corporate chain can out-compete an open, permissionless, credibly neutral base layer over decades.

I still don’t think so. If a private chain wins the “global settlement” slot, the problem isn’t Ethereum, it’s that the blockchain experiment failed its own thesis. I don’t think that’s where we land.

What Should Change (and Is Changing)

Two fixes are obvious:

1. Pay closer to market for critical talent. Dankrad leaving is the market’s way of saying the price just moved.

2. No more perceived or real EF kingmakers. Clearer grant frameworks, transparent comms, and earned social capital. To the EF’s credit, comms and grants have already become more structured, and external organizations like Etherealize are taking the marketing baton.

Dankrad didn’t torch Ethereum on the way out. He wrote that Tempo’s tech is open-source and “can easily integrate back into Ethereum,” and that he’ll remain an EF research advisor on scaling and UX. The copium read is “this will all help Ethereum.” But let’s be realistic: Ethereum must compete and hard, for its own talent on comp, on culture, and on narrative. Tempo is a competitor and should be treated as such (so should its employees).

Bottom line: Was the EF “wrong” to underpay? Not historically. It paid what the market allowed. But the market just changed and Ethereum is playing with the big leagues now.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

The AI CEO Era: Breaking Build Bottlenecks with Vibe Coding | Ahmad Shadid

In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Vinny sits down with Ahmad Shadid —former quant trader turned founder — who redirected the 2022 GPU crunch into a decentralized GPU network and now leads a bold push toward “sovereign superintelligence”: an AI CEO framework that can govern, fund, and scale itself transparently.

The conversation covers how zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized networks could reshape AI, and why security must keep pace in a world moving faster than audits. We talk leadership, the democratization of software, and the next wave of founders shipping products in days — not months.

Top News in the Past 24 Hours

BitMine Accumulates $800 Million of ETH Amid Market Weakness Digital asset treasury (DAT) activity picked up this week, as BitMine, Strategy, and others bought the dip. Why it matters: A new BERA treasury, supported by the Berachain Foundation, is the latest to jump on the DAT bandwagon, despite warnings (including from BitMine’s Tom Lee) that the DAT bubble is ready to pop.
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FEATURE: Is Institutional Adoption Ethereum’s ‘Worst Enemy’? This year, Ethereum firmly broke into the TradFi limelight, with more and more capital flowing into ETFs and DATs; Experts consider the question: is that a good thing for DeFi’s largest chain? Why it matters: Some commentators fear that traditional finance could tame the network’s open, cypherpunk spirit.