Install tf-models-official, pick a model (BERT/ALBERT/ELECTRA), download the checkpoint, and construct an encoder via EncoderConfig from either params.yaml (new) or legacy *_config.json. Wrap the encoder with tfm.nlp.models.BertClassifier for a 2-class head, then restore only encoder weights with tf.train.Checkpoint(...).read(...) (the head stays randomly initialized). For ELECTRA, discard the generator and use the discriminator (encoder) for downstream tasks. This gives a ready-to-fine-tune classifier across the BERT family with minimal code.Install tf-models-official, pick a model (BERT/ALBERT/ELECTRA), download the checkpoint, and construct an encoder via EncoderConfig from either params.yaml (new) or legacy *_config.json. Wrap the encoder with tfm.nlp.models.BertClassifier for a 2-class head, then restore only encoder weights with tf.train.Checkpoint(...).read(...) (the head stays randomly initialized). For ELECTRA, discard the generator and use the discriminator (encoder) for downstream tasks. This gives a ready-to-fine-tune classifier across the BERT family with minimal code.

Plug-and-Play LM Checkpoints with TensorFlow Model Garden

2025/09/10 15:00

Content Overview

  • Install TF Model Garden package
  • Import necessary libraries
  • Load BERT model pretrained checkpoints
  • Select required BERT model
  • Construct BERT Model Using the NEW params.yaml
  • Construct BERT Model Using the old bert_config.json
  • Construct a Classifier with encoder_config
  • Load Pretrained Weights into the BERT Classifier
  • Load ALBERT model pretrained checkpoints
  • Construct ALBERT Model Using the New params.yaml
  • Construct ALBERT Model Using the Old albert_config.json
  • Construct a Classifier with encoder_config
  • Load Pretrained Weights into the Classifier
  • Load ELECTRA model pretrained checkpoints
  • Construct BERT Model Using the NEW params.yaml
  • Construct a Classifier with encoder_config
  • Load Pretrained Weights into the Classifier

\ \ This tutorial demonstrates how to load BERT, ALBERT and ELECTRA pretrained checkpoints and use them for downstream tasks.

Model Garden contains a collection of state-of-the-art models, implemented with TensorFlow's high-level APIs. The implementations demonstrate the best practices for modeling, letting users to take full advantage of TensorFlow for their research and product development.

Install TF Model Garden package

pip install -U -q "tf-models-official" 

Import necessary libraries

import os import yaml import json  import tensorflow as tf 

\

2023-10-17 12:27:09.738068: E tensorflow/compiler/xla/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_dnn.cc:9342] Unable to register cuDNN factory: Attempting to register factory for plugin cuDNN when one has already been registered 2023-10-17 12:27:09.738115: E tensorflow/compiler/xla/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_fft.cc:609] Unable to register cuFFT factory: Attempting to register factory for plugin cuFFT when one has already been registered 2023-10-17 12:27:09.738155: E tensorflow/compiler/xla/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_blas.cc:1518] Unable to register cuBLAS factory: Attempting to register factory for plugin cuBLAS when one has already been registered 

\

import tensorflow_models as tfm  from official.core import exp_factory 

Load BERT model pretrained checkpoints

Select required BERT model

# @title Download Checkpoint of the Selected Model { display-mode: "form", run: "auto" } model_display_name = 'BERT-base cased English'  # @param ['BERT-base uncased English','BERT-base cased English','BERT-large uncased English', 'BERT-large cased English', 'BERT-large, Uncased (Whole Word Masking)', 'BERT-large, Cased (Whole Word Masking)', 'BERT-base MultiLingual','BERT-base Chinese']  if model_display_name == 'BERT-base uncased English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == 'BERT-base cased English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-large uncased English":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-large cased English":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-large, Uncased (Whole Word Masking)":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/wwm_uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "wwm_uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-large, Cased (Whole Word Masking)":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/wwm_cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "wwm_cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-base MultiLingual":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/multi_cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "multi_cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz" elif model_display_name == "BERT-base Chinese":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/chinese_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "chinese_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz" 

\

--2023-10-17 12:27:14--  https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/bert/v3/cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz Resolving storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)... 172.217.219.207, 209.85.146.207, 209.85.147.207, ... Connecting to storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)|172.217.219.207|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 401886728 (383M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz’  cased_L-12_H-768_A- 100%[===================>] 383.27M  79.4MB/s    in 5.3s      2023-10-17 12:27:19 (72.9 MB/s) - ‘cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.tar.gz’ saved [401886728/401886728]  cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/ cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/vocab.txt cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/bert_model.ckpt.index cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/bert_model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001 cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/params.yaml cased_L-12_H-768_A-12/bert_config.json 

\

# Lookup table of the directory name corresponding to each model checkpoint folder_bert_dict = {     'BERT-base uncased English': 'uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12',     'BERT-base cased English': 'cased_L-12_H-768_A-12',     'BERT-large uncased English': 'uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16',     'BERT-large cased English': 'cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16',     'BERT-large, Uncased (Whole Word Masking)': 'wwm_uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16',     'BERT-large, Cased (Whole Word Masking)': 'wwm_cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16',     'BERT-base MultiLingual': 'multi_cased_L-12_H-768_A-1',     'BERT-base Chinese': 'chinese_L-12_H-768_A-12' }  folder_bert = folder_bert_dict.get(model_display_name) folder_bert 

\

'cased_L-12_H-768_A-12' 

Construct BERT Model Using the New params.yaml

params.yaml can be used for training with the bundled trainer in addition to constructing the BERT encoder here.

\

config_file = os.path.join(folder_bert, "params.yaml") config_dict = yaml.safe_load(tf.io.gfile.GFile(config_file).read()) config_dict 

\

{'task': {'model': {'encoder': {'bert': {'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,      'dropout_rate': 0.1,      'hidden_activation': 'gelu',      'hidden_size': 768,      'initializer_range': 0.02,      'intermediate_size': 3072,      'max_position_embeddings': 512,      'num_attention_heads': 12,      'num_layers': 12,      'type_vocab_size': 2,      'vocab_size': 28996},     'type': 'bert'} } } } 

\

# Method 1: pass encoder config dict into EncoderConfig encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig(config_dict["task"]["model"]["encoder"]) encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 28996,  'hidden_size': 768,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 12,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 3072,  'dropout_rate': 0.1,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'embedding_size': None,  'output_range': None,  'return_all_encoder_outputs': False,  'return_attention_scores': False,  'norm_first': False} 

\

# Method 2: use override_params_dict function to override default Encoder params encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig() tfm.hyperparams.override_params_dict(encoder_config, config_dict["task"]["model"]["encoder"], is_strict=True) encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 28996,  'hidden_size': 768,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 12,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 3072,  'dropout_rate': 0.1,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'embedding_size': None,  'output_range': None,  'return_all_encoder_outputs': False,  'return_attention_scores': False,  'norm_first': False} 

Construct BERT Model Using the Old bert_config.json

bert_config_file = os.path.join(folder_bert, "bert_config.json") config_dict = json.loads(tf.io.gfile.GFile(bert_config_file).read()) config_dict 

\

{'hidden_size': 768,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'intermediate_size': 3072,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'num_attention_heads': 12,  'num_layers': 12,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'vocab_size': 28996,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'dropout_rate': 0.1,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1} 

\

encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig({     'type':'bert',     'bert': config_dict })  encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 28996,  'hidden_size': 768,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 12,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 3072,  'dropout_rate': 0.1,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'embedding_size': None,  'output_range': None,  'return_all_encoder_outputs': False,  'return_attention_scores': False,  'norm_first': False} 

Construct a classifier with encoder_config

Here, we construct a new BERT Classifier with 2 classes and plot its model architecture. A BERT Classifier consists of a BERT encoder using the selected encoder config, a Dropout layer and a MLP classification head.

\

bert_encoder = tfm.nlp.encoders.build_encoder(encoder_config) bert_classifier = tfm.nlp.models.BertClassifier(network=bert_encoder, num_classes=2)  tf.keras.utils.plot_model(bert_classifier) 

\

2023-10-17 12:27:24.243086: W tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:2211] Cannot dlopen some GPU libraries. Please make sure the missing libraries mentioned above are installed properly if you would like to use GPU. Follow the guide at https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu for how to download and setup the required libraries for your platform. Skipping registering GPU devices... 

\

Load Pretrained Weights into the BERT Classifier

The provided pretrained checkpoint only contains weights for the BERT Encoder within the BERT Classifier. Weights for the Classification Head is still randomly initialized.

\

checkpoint = tf.train.Checkpoint(encoder=bert_encoder) checkpoint.read(     os.path.join(folder_bert, 'bert_model.ckpt')).expect_partial().assert_existing_objects_matched() 

\

<tensorflow.python.checkpoint.checkpoint.CheckpointLoadStatus at 0x7f73f8418fd0> 

Load ALBERT model pretrained checkpoints

# @title Download Checkpoint of the Selected Model { display-mode: "form", run: "auto" } albert_model_display_name = 'ALBERT-xxlarge English'  # @param ['ALBERT-base English', 'ALBERT-large English', 'ALBERT-xlarge English', 'ALBERT-xxlarge English']  if albert_model_display_name == 'ALBERT-base English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/albert/albert_base.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "albert_base.tar.gz" elif albert_model_display_name == 'ALBERT-large English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/albert/albert_large.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "albert_large.tar.gz" elif albert_model_display_name == "ALBERT-xlarge English":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/albert/albert_xlarge.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "albert_xlarge.tar.gz" elif albert_model_display_name == "ALBERT-xxlarge English":   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/albert/albert_xxlarge.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "albert_xxlarge.tar.gz" 

\

--2023-10-17 12:27:27--  https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/albert/albert_xxlarge.tar.gz Resolving storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)... 172.253.114.207, 172.217.214.207, 142.251.6.207, ... Connecting to storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)|172.253.114.207|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 826059238 (788M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘albert_xxlarge.tar.gz’  albert_xxlarge.tar. 100%[===================>] 787.79M   117MB/s    in 6.5s      2023-10-17 12:27:34 (122 MB/s) - ‘albert_xxlarge.tar.gz’ saved [826059238/826059238]  albert_xxlarge/ albert_xxlarge/bert_model.ckpt.index albert_xxlarge/30k-clean.model albert_xxlarge/30k-clean.vocab albert_xxlarge/bert_model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001 albert_xxlarge/params.yaml albert_xxlarge/albert_config.json 

\

# Lookup table of the directory name corresponding to each model checkpoint folder_albert_dict = {     'ALBERT-base English': 'albert_base',     'ALBERT-large English': 'albert_large',     'ALBERT-xlarge English': 'albert_xlarge',     'ALBERT-xxlarge English': 'albert_xxlarge' }  folder_albert = folder_albert_dict.get(albert_model_display_name) folder_albert 

\

'albert_xxlarge' 

Construct ALBERT Model Using the New params.yaml

params.yaml can be used for training with the bundled trainer in addition to constructing the BERT encoder here.

\

config_file = os.path.join(folder_albert, "params.yaml") config_dict = yaml.safe_load(tf.io.gfile.GFile(config_file).read()) config_dict 

\

{'task': {'model': {'encoder': {'albert': {'attention_dropout_rate': 0.0,      'dropout_rate': 0.0,      'embedding_width': 128,      'hidden_activation': 'gelu',      'hidden_size': 4096,      'initializer_range': 0.02,      'intermediate_size': 16384,      'max_position_embeddings': 512,      'num_attention_heads': 64,      'num_layers': 12,      'type_vocab_size': 2,      'vocab_size': 30000},     'type': 'albert'} } } } 

\

# Method 1: pass encoder config dict into EncoderConfig encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig(config_dict["task"]["model"]["encoder"]) encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 30000,  'embedding_width': 128,  'hidden_size': 4096,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 64,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 16384,  'dropout_rate': 0.0,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.0,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02} 

\

# Method 2: use override_params_dict function to override default Encoder params encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig() tfm.hyperparams.override_params_dict(encoder_config, config_dict["task"]["model"]["encoder"], is_strict=True) encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 30000,  'embedding_width': 128,  'hidden_size': 4096,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 64,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 16384,  'dropout_rate': 0.0,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.0,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02} 

Construct ALBERT Model Using the Old albert_config.json

albert_config_file = os.path.join(folder_albert, "albert_config.json") config_dict = json.loads(tf.io.gfile.GFile(albert_config_file).read()) config_dict 

\

{'hidden_size': 4096,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'intermediate_size': 16384,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'num_attention_heads': 64,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'vocab_size': 30000,  'embedding_width': 128,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.0,  'dropout_rate': 0.0,  'num_layers': 12,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu'} 

\

encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig({     'type':'albert',     'albert': config_dict })  encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 30000,  'embedding_width': 128,  'hidden_size': 4096,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 64,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 16384,  'dropout_rate': 0.0,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.0,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02} 

Construct a Classifier with encoder_config

Here, we construct a new BERT Classifier with 2 classes and plot its model architecture. A BERT Classifier consists of a BERT encoder using the selected encoder config, a Dropout layer and a MLP classification head.

\

albert_encoder = tfm.nlp.encoders.build_encoder(encoder_config) albert_classifier = tfm.nlp.models.BertClassifier(network=albert_encoder, num_classes=2)  tf.keras.utils.plot_model(albert_classifier) 

\

Load Pretrained Weights into the Classifier

The provided pretrained checkpoint only contains weights for the ALBERT Encoder within the ALBERT Classifier. Weights for the Classification Head is still randomly initialized.

\

checkpoint = tf.train.Checkpoint(encoder=albert_encoder) checkpoint.read(     os.path.join(folder_albert, 'bert_model.ckpt')).expect_partial().assert_existing_objects_matched() 

\

<tensorflow.python.checkpoint.checkpoint.CheckpointLoadStatus at 0x7f73f8185fa0> 

Load ELECTRA model pretrained checkpoints

# @title Download Checkpoint of the Selected Model { display-mode: "form", run: "auto" } electra_model_display_name = 'ELECTRA-small English'  # @param ['ELECTRA-small English', 'ELECTRA-base English']  if electra_model_display_name == 'ELECTRA-small English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/electra/small.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "small.tar.gz" elif electra_model_display_name == 'ELECTRA-base English':   !wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/electra/base.tar.gz"   !tar -xvf "base.tar.gz" 

\

--2023-10-17 12:27:45--  https://storage.googleapis.com/tf_model_garden/nlp/electra/small.tar.gz Resolving storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)... 172.253.114.207, 172.217.214.207, 142.251.6.207, ... Connecting to storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)|172.253.114.207|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 157951922 (151M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘small.tar.gz’  small.tar.gz        100%[===================>] 150.63M   173MB/s    in 0.9s      2023-10-17 12:27:46 (173 MB/s) - ‘small.tar.gz’ saved [157951922/157951922]  small/ small/ckpt-1000000.data-00000-of-00001 small/params.yaml small/checkpoint small/ckpt-1000000.index 

\

# Lookup table of the directory name corresponding to each model checkpoint folder_electra_dict = {     'ELECTRA-small English': 'small',     'ELECTRA-base English': 'base' }  folder_electra = folder_electra_dict.get(electra_model_display_name) folder_electra 

\

'small' 

Construct BERT Model Using the params.yaml

params.yaml can be used for training with the bundled trainer in addition to constructing the BERT encoder here.

\

config_file = os.path.join(folder_electra, "params.yaml") config_dict = yaml.safe_load(tf.io.gfile.GFile(config_file).read()) config_dict 

\

{'model': {'cls_heads': [{'activation': 'tanh',     'cls_token_idx': 0,     'dropout_rate': 0.1,     'inner_dim': 64,     'name': 'next_sentence',     'num_classes': 2}],   'disallow_correct': False,   'discriminator_encoder': {'type': 'bert',    'bert': {'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,     'dropout_rate': 0.1,     'embedding_size': 128,     'hidden_activation': 'gelu',     'hidden_size': 256,     'initializer_range': 0.02,     'intermediate_size': 1024,     'max_position_embeddings': 512,     'num_attention_heads': 4,     'num_layers': 12,     'type_vocab_size': 2,     'vocab_size': 30522} },   'discriminator_loss_weight': 50.0,   'generator_encoder': {'type': 'bert',    'bert': {'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,     'dropout_rate': 0.1,     'embedding_size': 128,     'hidden_activation': 'gelu',     'hidden_size': 64,     'initializer_range': 0.02,     'intermediate_size': 256,     'max_position_embeddings': 512,     'num_attention_heads': 1,     'num_layers': 12,     'type_vocab_size': 2,     'vocab_size': 30522} },   'num_classes': 2,   'num_masked_tokens': 76,   'sequence_length': 512,   'tie_embeddings': True} } 

\

disc_encoder_config = tfm.nlp.encoders.EncoderConfig(     config_dict['model']['discriminator_encoder'] )  disc_encoder_config.get().as_dict() 

\

{'vocab_size': 30522,  'hidden_size': 256,  'num_layers': 12,  'num_attention_heads': 4,  'hidden_activation': 'gelu',  'intermediate_size': 1024,  'dropout_rate': 0.1,  'attention_dropout_rate': 0.1,  'max_position_embeddings': 512,  'type_vocab_size': 2,  'initializer_range': 0.02,  'embedding_size': 128,  'output_range': None,  'return_all_encoder_outputs': False,  'return_attention_scores': False,  'norm_first': False} 

Construct a Classifier with encoder_config

Here, we construct a Classifier with 2 classes and plot its model architecture. A Classifier consists of a ELECTRA discriminator encoder using the selected encoder config, a Dropout layer and a MLP classification head.

\

:::tip Note: The generator is discarded and the discriminator is used for downstream tasks

:::

\

disc_encoder = tfm.nlp.encoders.build_encoder(disc_encoder_config) elctra_dic_classifier = tfm.nlp.models.BertClassifier(network=disc_encoder, num_classes=2) tf.keras.utils.plot_model(elctra_dic_classifier) 

\

Load Pretrained Weights into the Classifier

The provided pretrained checkpoint contains weights for the entire ELECTRA model. We are only loading its discriminator (conveninently named as encoder) wights within the Classifier. Weights for the Classification Head is still randomly initialized.

\

checkpoint = tf.train.Checkpoint(encoder=disc_encoder) checkpoint.read(     tf.train.latest_checkpoint(os.path.join(folder_electra))     ).expect_partial().assert_existing_objects_matched() 

\

<tensorflow.python.checkpoint.checkpoint.CheckpointLoadStatus at 0x7f74dbe84f40> 

\ \

:::info Originally published on the TensorFlow website, this article appears here under a new headline and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Code samples shared under the Apache 2.0 License.

:::

\

Disclaimer: The articles reposted on this site are sourced from public platforms and are provided for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MEXC. All rights remain with the original authors. If you believe any content infringes on third-party rights, please contact service@support.mexc.com for removal. MEXC makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be considered a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC.
Share Insights

You May Also Like

Ethereum's "double crisis": core talent continues to leave, and technical debt quietly accumulates

Ethereum's "double crisis": core talent continues to leave, and technical debt quietly accumulates

By Eric, Foresight News On the evening of the 19th Beijing time, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman posted a message on X to "mourn" Dankrad Feist, the longest-serving researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, who chose to leave Ethereum and join the stablecoin L1 Tempo. David Hoffman believes the issue of for-profit companies co-opting the talent cultivated by the Ethereum open-source community is significant, and argues that these companies do not, as they claim, bring greater benefits to Ethereum. He bluntly stated, "In my view, Tempo's purpose is to intercept the trillions of dollars in stablecoins expected to flow in over the next decade and place them on their private blockchain. While this will certainly expand the market, Tempo still intends to grab as much of the pie as possible." He believes Tempo will inevitably be constrained by compliance issues, which even issuing tokens cannot address. While both Tempo and Ethereum will bring change to the world, Ethereum is uniquely suited to serve as a trusted, neutral global settlement layer, without shareholders and unconstrained by law. The feeling of disappointment with Ethereum began to surface when its price began to lag behind Bitcoin's in this cycle. However, over time, people began to realize that the exodus of talented individuals from the Ethereum community seemed irreversible. When dreams conflicted with self-interest, many ultimately chose the latter, a fact that many in the industry have long worried about. Dankrad Feist is not the first and will not be the last Dankrad Feist announced his joining Tempo at X on the 17th of this month and stated that he would continue to serve as a research advisor for the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Cluster's three strategic initiatives: scaling Layer 1, scaling Blobs, and improving user experience. He stated, "Ethereum has strong values and technology choices that make it unique. Tempo will be a great complement, building on similar technology and values while pushing boundaries in scale and speed. I believe this will be a significant benefit to Ethereum. Tempo's open-source technology can be easily integrated back into Ethereum, benefiting the entire ecosystem." According to LinkedIn, Dankrad Feist officially joined Ethereum as a researcher in 2019, focusing on sharding technology, which can scale the Ethereum mainnet. Danksharding, one of the core components of Ethereum's current scaling roadmap, is named after him. Danksharding is a key technical path for Ethereum to achieve high-throughput and low-cost transactions, and is widely considered by the community to be the most important upgrade direction after Ethereum 2.0. Dankrad Feist promoted Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844), a predecessor of Danksharding. This EIP introduced the blob transaction type, providing a cheaper and more efficient data availability layer for Rollup, significantly reducing the data publishing cost of Rollup. In addition, he had a public debate with Geth development lead Péter Szilágyi on the MEV issue, which eventually prompted Vitalik to step in to coordinate and promote the community's attention to MEV mitigation mechanisms (such as PBS, Proposer-Builder Separation). Tempo researcher Mallesh Pai introduced the members joining Tempo in September, and Liam Horne, former CEO of OP Labs and co-founder of ETHGlobal, also appeared on the list. Before Dankrad Feist, the person who surprised the industry was Danny Ryan, who co-founded Etherealize, a $40 million funding round. A former core member of the Ethereum Foundation and known as the "Chief Engineer of Ethereum 2.0," Ryan joined Etherealize just six months after announcing his indefinite departure in September 2024. However, given that Etherealize shares similarities with ConsenSys, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin 11 years prior amidst controversy over commercialization, Ryan's departure has been widely understood. What really worries David Hoffman are companies like Tempo and Paradigm. Well-known Ethereum developer Federico Carrone expressed a similar sentiment, retweeting David Hoffman's tweet about Dankrad Feist joining Tempo and stating that he has been saying for the past two years that Paradigm's influence within Ethereum could become a tail risk for the entire ecosystem. Federico Carrone wrote that the sole goal of a venture capital fund is to maximize returns for its limited partners. Ethereum shouldn't become deeply dependent on the technology of a venture capital firm that is playing its cards with extreme strategic skill. Following the FTX debacle, Paradigm removed nearly all cryptocurrency-related branding and made a high-profile shift to AI. Carrone believes this is proof enough of his point. After Trump returned to the White House, Paradigm re-entered the Web3 space, aggressively recruiting top researchers from the community, funding key Ethereum open-source libraries, and supporting Stripe's launch of Tempo. Carrone believes that while Paradigm claims its work is beneficial to Ethereum—more funding, more tools, more testing grounds, and the potential for new ideas to feed back into Ethereum—are all potential benefits, but when corporations have excessive visibility and influence over open-source projects, priorities shift from the community's long-term vision to corporate profits. Ethereum’s technical debt is accumulating The simple loss of talent in the Ethereum open source community may not cause widespread concern, but if the loss of talent is accompanied by the accumulation of technical debt, it is worthy of high vigilance. A week ago, a community user posted a screenshot on X, revealing that Solidity's top contributors have all but ceased development. Only Cameel continues to raise new issues and advance the technology, but appears to be in maintenance mode. He believes the community needs to invest more resources in supporting the programming language. Some users in the comments questioned why efforts were being expended on continuously improving and upgrading Solidity rather than simply maintaining it to ensure stability and security. The user who tweeted explained that even changing the Solidity compiler wouldn't change any deployed contracts, but could improve security, enhance the development experience, or support the use of new contracts. As can be seen in the chart above, development activity began to decline sharply at the beginning of the previous bull market. Federico Carrone also expressed his concern, stating that his biggest concern is that the numerous core tools and libraries built around Solidity may not receive long-term maintenance. Even the latest Solidity compiler is currently supported by only a handful of developers. Furthermore, companies involved in L2 and ZK technologies are downsizing, leaving the final iteration of cutting-edge technologies to a handful of companies. With increasing gas limits, many execution clients have not seen substantial performance improvements, and judging by the libraries, the development teams of these clients appear to be lagging behind. Federico Carrone said, “Ethereum’s technical debt continues to accumulate, not only because the protocol itself must continue to evolve, but also because many of its dependencies and surrounding repositories have become stagnant. The entire ecosystem continues to expand, protecting tens of billions of dollars in assets, while part of its foundation is quietly eroding.” Open source communities cannot simply "generate power with love" For an open-source community like Ethereum, which carries a vast amount of value that can be measured in real money, balancing "generate power with love" and economic incentives is a problem without any real precedent. This should be a matter of great concern to the Ethereum Foundation, but it seems to have been overlooked. Péter Szilágyi, who joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2015 and is responsible for the development and maintenance of Geth, clearly pointed out the three most disappointing problems in a letter to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation a year and a half ago: being portrayed as a leader externally but marginalized internally; the serious disproportion between income and the growth of Ethereum's market value; and Vitalik and a small group of people around him having too much say in the Ethereum ecosystem. In late 2024, Péter Szilágyi discovered that the Ethereum Foundation was secretly incubating an independent fork of Geth. He was subsequently fired due to a dispute with the Ethereum Foundation and repeatedly declined rehire. The Ethereum Foundation even offered Szilágyi $5 million to separate Geth from the Foundation, but was rejected. Currently, Szilágyi maintains the Geth codebase as an independent contributor. Rumors of corruption within the Ethereum Foundation have been circulating, but this is a problem that should have been anticipated from the moment the Ethereum Foundation was founded. As the saying goes, "where there are people, there are gangs." We can't eliminate human greed, but we also can't allow Ethereum to gradually lose its core value due to commercialization. Ethereum's market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, having handled trillions of dollars in on-chain value transfers for years, is built on infrastructure built by a professional technical team, centered on a permissionless, open-source ethos, and commercialized by a large number of businesses. However, simply maintaining such a massive system requires a significant workforce, and as we've discussed, these individuals are leaving due to disappointment or opting for other projects driven by financial gain. The Ethereum Foundation underwent drastic reforms this year, but so far, they haven't produced any significant results. Ethereum can still be called the world's computer, and its potential for commercial applications is still being explored by talented teams. However, as the foundation of all this, Ethereum cannot continue to disappoint those who still hold on to its ideals.
Share
2025/10/23 09:01
Share