The Hidden Bottleneck Slowing Ethereum (and How Optimum Fixed It) | MIT's Muriel Médard

Optimum CEO Says Traders Will Pay for Faster Ethereum Data as Validator Stake Tops 2.4 Million ETH

Optimum plans to earn revenue from traders who want faster access to Ethereum data, while keeping its block-propagation service free for validators, CEO Muriel Médard told The Defiant.

"It's the traders that are ultimately the income generator," Médard said in an interview with The Defiant founder Camila Russo. She said the trading products are currently minimum viable products and would let traders see onchain activity before confirmation and land their trades faster. She did not give a launch date or pricing.

The interview took place about a week after Optimum launched its mump2p protocol on Ethereum mainnet on Oct. 20. Médard said node operators running the software controlled "a little over two point four million ETH" as of the morning of the interview, and that almost 1 million ETH had been added in the days after Optimum opened onboarding beyond its initial partners. At launch, Optimum reported 1.4 million ETH across 16 node operators and about 22,000 validator keys.

Optimum's homepage now lists $7.7 billion in ETH stake boosted and 20 mainnet partners. At ETH's price of about $2,235 on CoinGecko on Nov. 5, that is roughly 3.4 million ETH, or close to 8% of the roughly 43.7 million ETH staked according to beaconcha.in data. Optimum calls the metric Total Value Boosted, which it defines as the stake run by operators connected to mump2p.

Médard named Everstake and P2P.org among the operators using the service. Both appear on the list of 16 launch operators in Optimum's Oct. 20 announcement.

How mump2p works

mump2p runs as a sidecar next to a validator's consensus client. According to Optimum's documentation, it reads block and attestation data from the client, encodes it with random linear network coding (RLNC) and sends the coded packets across Optimum's network of relay nodes, which the company calls Flexnodes. A receiving node rebuilds the block once it collects enough coded pieces. The gateway supports the Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus and Lodestar consensus clients.

The software runs in parallel with GossipSub, Ethereum's default gossip protocol. Optimum says it does not change consensus rules, does not access validator keys and that validators keep attesting and proposing over GossipSub if the sidecar goes down.

Médard co-invented RLNC at MIT. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at MIT and received the 2026 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for contributions to coding for reliable communications and networking.

She said the blockchain trilemma, which holds that a network cannot have speed, security and decentralization at once, applies to consensus rather than to the transmission of data. "In the data propagation side, the trilemma does not hold," she said. Her research found that nodes encoding data independently, without a central coordinator, can match or beat a centralized design, she said.

For validators, earlier block arrival leaves more time to attest to the correct head of the chain. Proposers can wait longer for higher MEV bids before publishing without missing the slot deadline. In its launch post, Optimum said one operator cut wrong head votes by 51% over a one-week before-and-after comparison. The operator was not named.

Speed figures

Médard said mainnet propagation has improved by "about 2x" and that "the jitter goes down by about 8x." She said testnet results were roughly six times faster and attributed the gap to integration work in moving to production. She said she expects larger gains over time.
Optimum's Oct. 20 press release cited propagation 2-4x faster than GossipSub and 7.88x lower arrival variance. The company's launch blog post said mump2p was 3.3x faster, or 335 milliseconds, over 50,292 slots, and that it accelerates 85-90% of blocks by 2.5-3.5x.

All of these numbers are Optimum's measurements. The company publishes them on its Hub dashboard, which aggregates data from nodes connected to mump2p and uses Xatu sentry nodes to time libp2p over the same blocks, according to the launch post.

Asked who measures performance, Médard said Optimum monitors the network continuously and has run A/B tests with validator partners, comparing performance with and without the software. "We'll be sharing some of those studies that we've done with them," she said.

Free for validators, with a size floor for one service

Médard said all validators receive the same service at no cost. "There's no throttling, there's no metering or anything like that," she said.

Optimum's website describes two services. Signal, which lets a validator receive blocks and attestations earlier, is free and open to any Ethereum validator. Accelerate, which speeds up the blocks and attestations a validator sends and includes a tool to optimize MEV bid cutoffs, is available only to operators running at least 200 validator keys. The website does not state a price for Accelerate. In the launch post, Optimum said it plans to bring Accelerate to professional trading firms next.

Optimum's press release described access as free and permissionless. In an Aug. 10 blog post, the company said the network was "permissioned for now," with operators connecting through an API key issued by Optimum. Since launch, operators can sign up through Optimum's Console and generate keys themselves. The same post said the gateway software is open source, while the RLNC library it calls is source-available: it can be inspected but not forked or reused. Optimum holds an exclusive license to the RLNC technology in Web3, with the patents held primarily by universities including MIT and Harvard, according to the post.

Other chains and a possible token

Médard said benefits will reach Ethereum users through less congestion during periods of high demand, arguing that the bottleneck sits in data exchange between nodes rather than in computation. mump2p does not change Ethereum's gas limit or slot time, which determine how much blockspace is available. Optimum says faster propagation creates room for bigger blocks and shorter slots, changes that would require Ethereum protocol upgrades.

Optimum plans to expand beyond Ethereum. "We are building a universal data acceleration layer for blockchain," Médard said, adding that the company intends to announce a second and third chain soon. She did not name them.

Asked about an Optimum token, Médard said: "I cannot say anything for now."