Offchain Labs has made an announcement to acquire Prysmatic Labs, the Ethereum core developers team. It was behind the architecture of The Merge and engineered the transition of the Ethereum blockchain to Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Prysmatic Labs is Ethereum’s most prominent Layer1 team and the integration of the two should be seen as a step forward to enhance Ethereum’s scalability.

In a blog posted on 12th October, the New- York based company Offchain Labs shared the information that it is joining forces with Prysmatic Labs as they share common passion for developing ‘cutting-edge’ technology and scaling Ethereum. This integration must be seen as crucial as it means a merge of both the Layers. According to Offchain Labs, the future of Ethereum relies on Layer1 for consensus and data availability. Whereas Layer2 is important for execution and scalability. Acquisition of Prysmatic Labs is a big step toward combining experts in these two domains.

Prysmatic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan said that the merge of the two labs would constitute a strong unified Ethereum ‘team’ which is aligned for the success of Ethereum.

“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," said Jordan.

Preston Van Loon of the Prysmatic Labs calls the acquisition a ‘merge’ between Prsymatic Labs and Offchain Labs to further enhance the scalability after The Merge happened this year in September. The tie between the two will help to put more impact globally. Preston said, “a close collaboration between Layer 1 and Layer 2 can allow for these technologies to iterate and deliver faster.”

Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder too said that he is incredibly excited to join hands with the talented team of engineers at the Prysmatic Labs and looking forward to working together towards scaling Ethereum.

Will the integration help Arbitrum to expand?

[Arbitrum](https://offchainlabs.com/ and http://arbitrum.io/) network is a layer-2 functionality developed by Offchain Labs. It tends to solve the congestion that the Ethereum network has been experiencing by improving how smart contracts are validated. Arbitrum allows users of its network to transact on Ethereum with lower fees and higher transaction speed. The acquisition should be seen as a major milestone for Offchain Labs as it will help the company to expand Arbitrum.

What will happen to the previous projects of Prysmatic Labs?

The joining hands of the Prysmatic labs and Offchain labs would not mean that the previous projects of the Prysmatic labs would halt or come to an end. They would continue to progress.

Prysmatic Labs made its mark by creating Prysm which is a popular Ethereum proof-of-stake client written in Go. According to Offchain Chief Technology Officer Harry Kalodner, the Prysmatic team will continue to maintain the Prysm client post-acquisition. Even after the merge of the two labs, Prysm will continue to be developed as a fully open-source and neutral consensus client.

Prysmatic Labs team will further enhance its efforts to bring EIP-4844 data- sharding to production. All of this work will continue uninterrupted.