Prysm + Offchain Labs Anniversary Update

Happy Anniversary! 🎂

One year ago today, Offchain Labs announced the acquisition of Prysmatic Labs. It’s been an incredibly busy year since, with several quarterly updates to the Prysm Client, and the Prysm engineering team spending time on both core Ethereum development and improvements to the Arbitrum stack.

So we’d like to wish everyone a happy anniversary and recap some of the ways Prysm fits with Offchain Labs’ core mission to scale the Ethereum ecosystem.

How does Prysm contribute to scaling Ethereum?

At the time of writing, Prsym and other affiliated Ethereum projects represent about 20% of Offchain Labs current engineering team, a significant investment of the company’s engineering resources.

The Prysm repository is completely FOSS-licensed, evidence of Offchain Labs’s commitment to giving back to the community as part of the company’s overall mission to scale Ethereum.

To achieve this scale, Offchain Labs believes that it is critical not only for L2 roll-ups to continue to advance their own technology stacks but also for L2 roll-up projects to be deeply involved in the development of Ethereum itself. This tight relationship helps ensure technology alignment between the two communities, remove roadblocks, create better code, and drive faster innovation.

What has the Prysm team accomplished over the past year?

In addition to the most recent Prysm update, some of the team also works on R&D related to the Arbitrum stack. Over the past year, the team has accomplished the following:

• Validator withdrawals shipped successfully with Prysm at Offchain Labs, closing the full circle of Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake
• 3 of the top 5 most effective staking operators on Ethereum run Prysm. The Prysm team is in the top 5 themselves
• Key developers of Arbitrum’s new challenge protocol, BOLD, which can enable permissionless validator for Arbitrum technology. This is a major milestone for the decentralization of Arbitrum chains
• Developer tooling and other contributions to Arbitrum Stylus.
  Check out Raul’s developer tutorial on getting started with Arbitrum Stylus!
• One of the leading teams for EIP4844 contributions. Prysm teammates helped contribute to the standardization of 4844 on the consensus layer and built some of the first prototype implementations
• Prysm quality as a client has improved significantly since joining Offchain Labs
• Prysm versions 4.0.5, 4.0.7, and 4.0.8 have major quality-of-life improvements for Ethereum validators
• Resource usage of Prysm continues to improve with large reductions through innovations in memory usage PR12616
• Block verification latency has decreased by 20%, and even more dramatically by 100% under edge cases around epoch boundary which is key for the safety of Ethereum¹. See PRs for further details: PR12590, PR12462
• Attestation aggregation has order-of-magnitude improvements, the aggregation time has reduced by ~80%. See PR for further details. PR12350
• Potuz from the Prysm team released a highly optimized hashing library called hashtree that has order-of-magnitude improvements for all Ethereum consensus clients

Speaking & Appearances

The Prysm team has not only been hard at work behind the scenes but has also been actively engaging with the community! Below are some of the speaking engagements and appearances the team has participated in over the course of the past year:

Oct — Dec 2022

• The Right Way to Hash a Merkle Tree by Potuz, Devcon Bogotá
• Hybrid PBS from CL’s Perspective by Terence Tsao, Devcon Bogotá
• Massive Arbitrum Acquisition!! with Steven Goldfeder & Preston Van Loon, Bankless
• The Merge 2.0: Prysmatic Labs x Arbitrum AMA, Arbitrum
• Arbitrum’s Roadmap to Scale Ethereum, Empire

Jan — Oct 2023

• Staked ETH Withdrawal (Testing) with Potuz & Hsiao-Wei Wang, PEEPanEIP #94
• Prysm & the Future of Ethereum, Arbitrum
• EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions, PEEPanEIP #104
• EIP4844 from CL Client’s Perspective with Terence Tsao, ETH Denver
• Did Ethereum Break? with Preston Van Loon & Terence Tsao, Bankless
• Ethereum Client Diversity, Crypto Consortium
• Enshrining PBS to Ethereum: towards a minimal spec, ETH Barcelona
• Terence Tsao: L2 sequencing. Where we at? Where we want to be?, ETH CC
• Arbitrum’s BOLD New Bet with Ed Felten & Raul Jordan, Bankless
• Just a Small Core Dev Living in an L2 World, Arbitrum Day, ETH Paris
• Preston Van Loon & Raul Jordan: Scaling Ethereum, Beneath The Layers
• Arbitrum Stylus: Rust Smart Contracts on L2, Rust x Ethereum Day 2023, ETH Chicago

What’s next for the Prysm team?

In addition to playing a critical role in the development of BOLD and Stylus for the Arbitrum stack, the team will continue to develop the Prysm client and be core contributors to EIP-4844 data sharding innovation.

To keep up to date with our work, you can follow us on Twitter and join our Discord, and meet some of the Prysm at Arbitrum Day during this year’s Devonnect in Istanbul November.

¹ Cited performance metrics are gathered from internal metering. See corresponding PRs for more details