Offchain Labs has announced that it is acquiring Prysmatic Labs, one of the core development teams behind the Ethereum (ETH) merge. Prysmatic Labs is also responsible for the creation of Prysm, the leading Ethereum consensus client. On the other hand, Offchain Labs is the team behind ETH’s later-2 network, Arbitrum.
As per the announcement,
“The best L1 team joins the best L2 team.”
Offchain Labs’ efforts to increase the reach of Arbitrum have reached a significant turning point with the acquisition. The acquisition is a further indication of the growing effect of layer 2 scaling platforms.
How will the acquisition affect Ethereum?
As per the official announcement, layer 1 is essential for consensus and data availability, whereas layer 2 is essential for execution and scalability. For Ethereum to have a viable future, there has to be more direct collaboration as well as better communication between the people working on the two tiers.
The acquisition announcement further sheds light on the commonalities between Offchain Labs and Prysmatic Labs. Both teams share a common “passion for developing cutting-edge technology.” With best-in-class products, both teams are capable of establishing new benchmarks for the industry. Finally, they both have a dedication to scaling Ethereum.
Harry Kalodner, the chief technology officer for Offchain, claims that the Prysmatic team would continue to support the Prysm client after the acquisition.
Raul Jordan, co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, stated,
“Our mission from day one was to scale Ethereum and make it an impactful technology for the world. Merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us as an Ethereum team because: (1) we develop software extensively in Go, (2) are fully incentive-aligned with the success of Ethereum, and (3) are focused on shipping quality software for others to use.”
While Ethereum’s client exchanges hands, the crypto token itself has suffered greatly this bear season. After reaching an all-time high of $4,878.26 in November of 2021, ETH has dropped by nearly 70%. The transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus method turned out to be a “sell the news” event, and it did not do much to push ETH’s price.
At press time, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $1,277.47, down by 5.6% in the last seven days.