"In traditional finance, firms spend billions shaving milliseconds off execution because speed is money. The same economics now apply to Ethereum's top operators," said Muriel Médard, co-founder and chief executive of Optimum and the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at MIT. "Optimum is the optimal acceleration path, built on a new coded networking approach for systems that are truly decentralized, where nodes don't rely on one coordinator with perfect information."
Médard received the 2026 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for contributions to coding for reliable communications and networking.
Recoding Blocks In Flight
Ethereum's networking relays the same block data repeatedly between peers, which is why validators see the same block at different times. Optimum replaces that with Random Linear Network Coding, developed under Médard at MIT. A publisher splits a block into fragments and emits coded shards, each a random linear combination of the fragments. Any node holding shards can forward and recombine them without waiting for the whole message, and a receiver reconstructs the block once it holds enough linearly independent shards.
The sidecar design means a failure in Optimum's layer leaves the validator running on GossipSub. Onboarding takes one engineer under an hour, the company said.
Mainnet Against Testnet
Optimum said early mainnet measurements show blocks arriving 2.42 times faster than the GossipSub baseline, with 7.88 times lower arrival variance, and that validators running mump2p saw the block before Ethereum's default networking layer in nine of 10 measurements. The company has not published the sample size, the measurement window, the clients involved or who ran the test.
Optimum's product page advertises 6 to 20 times faster block and blob delivery and about 150 milliseconds average block propagation, figures drawn from the Hoodi testnet. The mainnet numbers in the announcement are lower.
Ether.fi Makes It Standard
Optimum said ether.fi recently required all 12 of its node operators to run mump2p, moving it from optional to standard across the staking protocol's validator set. Ether.fi has not published anything about Optimum on its blog, docs or governance forum, and its own institutional page describes using more than 20,000 node operators worldwide.
"We don't mandate new infrastructure across our entire validator set unless we're confident it raises the bar for our stakers and for the network," said Rok Kopp, co-founder and chief growth officer of ether.fi. "Better networking means better outcomes for stakers and a stronger Ethereum."
The announcement describes ether.fi as managing more than $6 billion in assets. Ether.fi's own institutional page puts its TVL at $4.76 billion, and DefiLlama shows about $5.47 billion across all four ether.fi products.
The other operators Optimum named are Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish, Luganodes, InfStones, Meria, Finoa, Node.Monster, HashKey Cloud, DSRV, RockX, Ebunker and Bitcoin Suisse. Two of the 16 are unnamed.
"Validator performance is a game of margins, and the ones you can control are worth chasing. Propagation timing is one of them," said Dan Spina, engineering manager for NodeOps at Blockdaemon. "At the scale we secure digital assets for institutional clients, these controllable margins compound — and every improvement we can make with confidence matters."
Getting On The Network
Optimum said connecting to mump2p is free and permissionless. The company's August blog post said operators need an API key issued by Optimum, and its validator page says it is onboarding an initial group of enterprise validator partners and asks applicants for company details and operational scale. The sign-up address given in the announcement, getoptimum.xyz/mump2p, redirects to the product page.
Faster beacon block and attestation access is free for validators and will stay free, Optimum said in August. The gateway software is open source; the RLNC library itself is source-available and cannot be forked or reused.
Lido's research forum carries an open request for its node operators to run and test mump2p on the Hoodi testnet. Lido is not among the operators named in Tuesday's announcement.
The 22,000 keys average about 64 $ETH each, above the old 32 $ETH ceiling and in line with the network since EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance to 2,048 $ETH in the Pectra upgrade. Ethereum's validator count has been falling as staked $ETH rises, with about 830,000 validators now averaging 52.7 $ETH apiece.
$ETH traded at about $2,385 on Tuesday morning, down 1.4% over 24 hours and 4.5% over the week, according to CoinGecko.
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