Offchain Labs acquires Ethereum core dev team Prysmatic Labs

Through the deal, Offchain Labs hopes to build a sustainable future for Ethereum, through greater communication between teams developing on both layers and direct collaborations.

One of the core development teams behind the Ethereum (ETH) Merge, Prysmatic Labs, has been acquired by Offchain Labs, the developer of Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. 

Announced in an Oct. 13 blog post by Offchain Labs, the deal’s financial terms were not disclosed, but it was noted Prysmatic Labs chose to join Offchain Labs “for many reasons,” but mainly because of the two companies’ alignment in their core beliefs.

Prysmatic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan said the move will “build a unified team stronger than the sum of its parts.”

“Merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us as an Ethereum team because we develop software extensively in Go, are fully incentive-aligned with the success of Ethereum, and are focused on shipping quality software for others to use,” Jordan said.

Offchain Labs claims the future of ETH relies on layer 1 for consensus and data availability and layer 2 for execution and scalability, and its acquisition of Prysmatic Labs is a step toward combining experts in these two areas.

Despite the Prysmatic Labs team officially joining Offchain Labs, their “work will continue uninterrupted,” and their work in Ethereum node client software will continue to be developed under Offchain’s umbrella.

They are still developing Prysm as a fully open-source and neutral consensus client and bringing EIP-4844 data-sharding to production.

The post ends by teasing possible future collaborations between the two teams.

“There are several other joint initiatives that we plan to work on together, furthering both L1 and L2 development.”

Related: Offchain Labs launches Arbitrum One mainnet, secures $120M in funding

Prysmatic Labs is one of the core engineering teams behind the Merge and built Prysm, the leading ETH consensus client that’s now powering Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus.

Offchain Labs is a venture-backed and Princeton-founded company developing Arbitrum, a suite of scaling technologies for Ethereum, with two live chains, Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.