One of the core development teams behind the Ethereum Merge, Prysmatic Labs, has been acquired by Offchain Labs, the developer of the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum.Â
Announced in an Oct. 13 blog post by Offchain Labs, the dealâs financial terms were not disclosed, but it was noted Prysmatic Labs chose to join Offchain Labs âfor many reasons,â but mainly because of the two companiesâ alignment in their core beliefs.
Prysmatic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan said the move will âbuild a unified team stronger than the sum of its parts.â
âMerging 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,â Jordan said.
Offchain Labs claims the future of Ethereum 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 âwork will continue uninterrupted,â and their work in Ethereum node client software will continue to be developed under Offchainâs 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.
âThere are several other joint initiatives that we plan to work on together, furthering both L1 and L2 development.â
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 Ethereum consensus client thatâs now powering Ethereumâs 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.