Offchain Labs is a venture-backed and Princeton-founded company responsible for developing Arbitrum, an "Optimistic Rollup" scaling solution for Ethereum. ^[1][2]

History

Offchain Labs was founded in 2018 by Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner. Ed Felten was a former deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House and a retired Princeton Professor of Computer Science & Public Affairs at Princeton University.

While at Princeton, the three co-founders developed the Arbitrum technology and published a paper in 2018. Offchain was created with a mission to scale Ethereum and bring it to the public. Steven Goldfeder holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and Ed and Steven are authors of the textbook Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.

"Arbitrum acts like a layer between the user and Ethereum to give all the security guarantees of the blockchain while using a lot less of the core Ethereum resource" - Ed Felten, co-founder, Offchain Labs

Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder & Harry Kalodner

Mainnet Launch & 120M Funding

On August 31, 2021, Offchain Labs, the leading provider of scaling solutions for Ethereum, announced the release of its Arbitrum One mainnet to the public. Arbitrum One has had several projects sign up for access on its platform since its beta launch for developers in May 2021. Offchain Labs created the platform to meet the demand for Ethereum scaling solutions that do not endanger the security of the base layer. Its EVM compatibility means that projects can deploy without altering their contracts. ^[3]

Offchain Labs also revealed that it secured $120 million in a Series B fundraising round. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also saw participation from crypto investors Polychain Capital, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research, and Mark Cuban. ^[4]

"We are excited to partner with our investors who understand the importance of scaling Ethereum and bringing the Ethereum ecosystem to the masses," said Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO, Offchain Labs. "The tremendous support we've seen from developers across the globe validates our mission to be the first to marry the world of FinTech and Defi."

Arbitrum Nova x Reddit

In August 2022, Offchain Labs unveiled Arbitrum Nova as the chain designed for gaming and decentralized social applications. The social media platform Reddit announced it would be using the scaling solution Arbitrum to handle scaling its Ethereum-based Community Points system. Reddit administrator Jarins said the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points. The platform cited Arbitrum’s features of being decentralized, developer-friendly, and having broad ecosystem support in its decision. ^[5][6][11]

“One of the beautiful things about Reddit doing community points on Nova is that it's an open public network where anyone else can launch points, contracts, and applications on,” said Arbitrum CEO Steven Goldfeder. ^[10]

The partnership created opportunities for collaboration among the Ethereum and Reddit communities and gave Reddit users more ways to utilize their community points on the Ethereum blockchain. ^[10]

Prysmatic Labs Acquisition

On October 12, 2022, Offchain Labs announced it was acquiring Prysmatic Labs^[7], one of the core engineering teams behind Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake. Prysmatic Labs originally made its mark by creating Prysm, Ethereum’s most popular consensus layer client – a key piece of software for the disintermediated network of computers that keep Ethereum up and running. ^[8]

"Prysmatic Labs possesses an incredibly talented team of engineers, and their dedication to the Ethereum community shows via their best-in-class product that is used broadly in the Ethereum ecosystem. We are looking forward to the integration of the Prysmatic Labs team as we work together to scale Ethereum." - Steven Goldfeder, CEO of Offchain Labs ^[9]

The acquisition marked a major milestone for Offchain Labs in its bid to expand the footprint of Arbitrum, its optimistic rollup network which allows users to transact on Ethereum. The acquisition also signaled the influence of layer 2 scaling platforms on the Ethereum ecosystem. ^[8]

“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,” Raul Jordan, the co-founder of Prysmatic Labs said in a statement shared with CoinDesk. ^[8]