By buying the team behind Prysm, Ethereum’s most popular consensus layer client, Arbitrum is extending its layer 2 tentacles down to Ethereum’s base layer.
Offchain Labs, the company behind the Ethereum layer 2 network Arbitrum, said it was buying Prysmatic Labs, which was one of the main engineering teams behind Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake.
The acquisition is a big step for Offchain Labs as it tries to grow the reach of Arbitrum, its optimistic rollup network that lets Ethereum users do business with lower fees and faster speeds. Also, Offchain’s purchase of one of Ethereum’s most important layer 1 teams shows that layer 2 scaling platforms are becoming more important in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Prysmatic Labs first made a name for itself by making Prysm the most popular consensus layer client for Ethereum. Prysm is a key piece of software for the computer network that keeps Ethereum running without any middlemen.
“As an Ethereum team, merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us because we build a lot of software in the programming language Go, have a lot riding on the success of Ethereum, and are focused on putting out good software for other people to use,” Raul Jordan, the co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, said in a statement that was sent to a news outlet.
Harry Kalodner, the CTO of Offchain, says that the Prysmatic team will continue to work on the Prysm client after the acquisition. Kalodner told CoinDesk, “It is in no way an acquisition.” “As their time opens up,” Kalodner said, “they’ll start to integrate more and spend more time working on the future of [layer 2].”
Neither Offchain Labs nor Prysmatic Labs have talked about how much their deal will cost.
Crunchbase says that since Offchain Labs was started in 2018, investors have given it more than $120 million. With the addition of 11 new Prysmatic Labs employees, it now has more than 60 employees.
