Arbitrum’s next chapter: Smart accounts, UX, and Offchain Labs’ ZeroDev bet

Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, has acquired smart account infrastructure provider ZeroDev in a move that signals its ambitions beyond scaling infrastructure. 

The deal, which brings ZeroDev’s five-person team fully into Offchain Labs, represents what CEO Steven Goldfeder calls “a very logical next iteration” of the company’s mission.

Founded in 2018, Offchain Labs initially focused on scaling Ethereum with optimistic rollups. But Goldfeder says the broader goal has always been “to solve the hardest problems that are standing in the way of bringing blockchain technology to mass adoption.”

In that light, the acquisition isn’t a pivot, Goldfeder told Blockworks. “We started off [with] layer two, we went down to layer one, and now we’re going a little bit further up…in the smart contract layer,” he said. “We can make these tools work seamlessly together.”

ZeroDev, whose platform powers smart account infrastructure for projects like ApeChain, Infinex, and Crossmint, fits neatly into that stack-wide ambition. “They’re the leaders, the innovators in the smart account space,” Goldfeder said. “It fit very well with the profile of our team.”

With smart accounts enabling features like gas abstraction, programmable security, and automated transactions, Offchain sees them as critical to onboarding the next wave of users. The challenge today, according to Goldfeder, is not just the technology but the fractured developer experience; he flagged “wallet integration and wallet support” as a bottleneck.

“Often the user experience doesn’t seamlessly pull these all together in a way that’s abstracted away from the user,” Goldfeder said.

He offered a familiar metaphor: “When I go on YouTube to watch a video, I don’t get a pop-up that says, ‘Do you wanna watch this video on AWS or on GCP?’ I just want to watch my video.”

Chain fragmentation remains a UX hurdle, even within the Arbitrum ecosystem. “If I’m a user on Arbitrum One and I want to go and buy an NFT on ApeChain…The gas on Arbitrum is ETH, the gas on ApeChain is APE, maybe I’m holding ARB, but there’s just a lot of manual steps.”

ZeroDev’s smart account tooling could help streamline this, and other of the “harder problems.”

“Everyone says Ethereum has a fragmentation problem,” Goldfeder said, “This is just another tool in our toolbox.”

That tooling focus doesn’t mean Offchain Labs is losing sight of scaling fundamentals. The company is still exploring hybrid rollup architectures, including eventual ZK proof integration.

For now, Offchain is betting that improved UX, smart accounts, and deeper vertical integration will push Ethereum’s most-used rollup into a new phase. “It’s not only about the raw technical components,” Goldfeder said, “but how do we actually package it up?”

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