Optimum, a networking startup run by MIT professor Muriel Médard, said Tuesday that its block-propagation software, mump2p, is in production on Ethereum mainnet, and that liquid restaking provider ether.fi now requires every one of its 12 node operators to use it.
Speed is money, and with faster block propagation technology, there’s an opportunity to improve a $100 billion market with increased efficiency, scalability, and monetary returns.
When discussing Ethereum's scalability, most conversations revolve around the execution and consensus layers. Beneath these two layers, however, lies an even more fundamental domain: the networking layer...
Blockchain technology has been heralded as the foundation of a new decentralized internet, now referred to as Web3.
Latency is not only UX; it shapes behavior & market structure....
Optimum’s new propagation layer promises to reshape Ethereum’s validator economics, starting with better performance and higher staking yield, but pointing toward future protocol upgrades like shorter slot times.
Optimum is Live on Ethereum Mainnet
The Optimum team is pleased to announce our first mainnet deployment, mump2p on Ethereum. With mump2p, data moves across all of Ethereum 2-3x faster, boosting validator performance and network health.
The Great Relocation: New Wall Street Is Being Built Onchain
Someone at a firm managing tens of billions told me: "We spend more time watching Hyperliquid than Bloomberg now." A year ago, saying that out loud would have gotten you laughed out of the room.
Optimizing a $100B Market: Effects of Latency Reduction on ETH Staking Revenue
Ethereum validators earn rewards by participating in the network’s consensus process. These rewards are shaped by multiple factors, including validator performance, current network conditions, and, critically, the efficiency with which data (e.g., blocks, attestations) propagates through the network.
At Optimum, we believe Ethereum's network layer has room for a real leap forward, one that comes not from changing consensus, not from asking operators to take on more risk, but from making propagation faster and more reliable for everyone.
Chief Product Officer Sajida Zouarhi explores the hidden costs of uncertain propagation latency on Ethereum and how mump2p's speed and consistency improves the blockspace pipeline.
In this article, we quantify the impact of network latency, and more specifically block propagation latency, on key performance indicators that directly determine a validator’s annual percentage rate (APR). Our central question is: to what extent do improvements in network latency translate into measurable APR gains for validator operators?
Blockchain speed and throughput depends heavily on how fast and efficiently validators can communicate. They propose blocks, send them around to all the other validators, and agree on the updated state of the chain to achieve consensus. What if you could help them out?
Optimum is proud to announce that our CEO and co-founder, Professor Muriel Médard, has been awarded the 2026 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for her groundbreaking contributions to coding for reliable communications and networking.
Solana is renowned for its high throughput and sub-second block times, but speed isn’t just about how fast a leader can produce a block – it’s also about how quickly that data reaches every validator. In a network where slots last only ~400ms, even a 100ms delay in block propagation can be significant. This article dives into Solana’s block propagation stack (Turbine, ShredStream, JetStreamer), the limitations it faces, and why further accelerating data propagation (with RLNC-based propagation) is critical for Solana’s future scalability and reliability.
Optimum recently announced that mump2p is delivering 150ms average block propagation on Ethereum Hoodi testnet - 6x faster than Gossipsub's ~1 second baseline. This significant performance gain directly benefits validators with more time to attest, higher inclusion rates, and better performance during congestion, while improving overall chain efficiency and user experience. So how is this actually measured? Where do these numbers come from? This post walks through the technical implementation - the measurement methodology, the metrics architecture, and the validation approach that produces these results.
Optimum enables validators to send data faster and more efficiently, in turn raising the scalability of the blockchain they operate on.
Throughout blockchain history, scaling has been tethered to decentralization. Every chain has taken their own approach, but most can be boiled down to either “We make zero sacrifices to decentralization and we’ll work in some scaling where we can”, or “we’re fine with less decentralization, let’s maximize our performance instead”. Essentially the Ethereum vs. Solana debate in a nutshell, and the core concept of the blockchain trilemma. You can go faster by raising hardware requirements for validators, or keeping them confined to a geographical region, but even those approaches hit their limits.
Ever wonder why your transaction takes so long to confirm, even on a “fast” network? It turns out the culprit isn’t just block time or throughput, it’s how information spreads across the network...
In decentralized blockchain implementations, three properties are highly desirable: decentralization, security, and scalability.
Blockchains power everything from simple payments to complex financial markets, from AI training to inferencing.
In peer-to-peer networks, nodes need to disseminate information to each other, a task known as gossip. Gossipsub is a widely-used algorithm to perform
mump2p is coming. Currently in private testnet with a group of leading Ethereum validators and node operators, mump2p boosts the speed and efficiency of communicating data between nodes.
In the first part of this series, we explored how packet loss accumulates in block and fountain codes—even in simple network topologies such as daisy chains—and how the recoding capability of RLNC effectively mitigates this issue. In this follow-up article, we examine hierarchical topologies, such as trees, which have been adopted by Web3 protocols such as Monad and Solana. We present a simple example demonstrating that, even in tree-based architectures, RLNC can outperform both Raptor and Reed–Solomon (RS) codes by achieving lower latency.
Sending data over shaky or delayed connections often means it gets lost or delayed. The old way to deal with this was simply to resend anything that didn’t make it (like the TCP protocol does). But this approach has problems, especially on crowded networks where resending things just adds to the traffic jam and leads to further delays.
Blockchain technology has been heralded as the foundation of a new decentralized internet, now referred to as Web3. But as this "world computer" grows, it’s becoming increasingly clear that something fundamental is missing: a high-performance memory layer.
