This is a blow to Ethereum's hopes for scaling in the short term. Image: Shutterstock.

Ethereum research organization Plasma Group has announced it will cease operations, in its current form. It will donate its remaining funds to Gitcoin, a platform connecting freelancers with jobs, while it seeks further funding, a new focus and perhaps a rebrand.

"This week marks the first anniversary of Plasma Group. It will also be the last," the blog post stated, adding, "We will be donating the entirety of what we have left to Gitcoin. We believe Gitcoin is doing some of the most critical and underrated work not only in the blockchain space but also in the greater space of public goods."

Plasma Group was a nonprofit organization focused on researching how to make Ethereum more scalable. Specifically, it was helping to build Plasma, a second-layer scaling solution built on Ethereum—roughly its equivalent to Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

Recently, at Devcon 5, in Osaka, Japan, Plasma Group unveiled a new scaling solution in partnership with Uniswap. It launched a working demonstration showcasing Optimistic Rollups, an alternative technology for making faster cryptocurrency payments.

Plasma Group is not done yet though. It hopes to come back in another form, with another purpose.

"We’re eager to get to work on the next urgent problem facing the community we love. We still have a lot that we need to figure out! But we’re not done working for this community, so stay tuned — you’ll be hearing from us again very soon. It’s certainly not a problem we’ll be sleeping on."

In the meantime, Ethereum developers are working on introducing a technology known as sharding, to the network, in an attempt to make the actual blockchain itself more scalable—rather than building second layer solutions, such as Plasma. But there's a long road ahead.