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.
The company counted 16 node operators on the protocol, running roughly 22,000 validator keys with more than 1.4 million ETH at stake. Optimum put that at over 3% of all ETH staked. Operators it named include Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish and Bitcoin Suisse.
Ether.fi, which announced a blockspace deal with ETHGas in April, had previously left the software optional for its operators, according to Optimum. “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, ether.fi’s co-founder and chief growth officer, in the announcement.
Optimum also gave a dollar figure of about $3.7 billion in what it calls “Total Value Boosted,” a metric of its own that the announcement does not define.
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Speed Figures Come From Optimum
Ethereum validators lose attestation and MEV rewards when they see a block late, and Optimum argues that validators far from major hosting hubs pay the most. Its pitch is a faster path for blocks between nodes: mump2p runs as an added channel next to Ethereum’s standard gossip rather than replacing it, the company wrote in August, and encodes data using random linear network coding, a technique the company says was co-invented at MIT.
By Optimum’s own early mainnet measurements, blocks arrived 2.42 times faster than with GossipSub, the peer-to-peer messaging protocol Ethereum’s consensus layer uses by default, and arrival-time variance was about 7.88 times lower. The company said mump2p users got the block first in nine of 10 measurements. The numbers are self-reported, and the announcement did not say how they were gathered. The same two multiples appeared in an Optimum-sponsored Four Pillars report in August, which described a test across 30 gateways while the company was still preparing its mainnet integration.
Médard framed the case in trading terms in the announcement: “In traditional finance, firms spend billions shaving milliseconds off execution because speed is money.”
From Testnet to Production
Optimum ran a private testnet with seven operators in June 2025, two months after raising an $11 million seed round led by 1kx. It says connecting is free and permissionless, needs no changes to consensus or execution software, and takes one engineer less than an hour. In August, however, Optimum described the network as permissioned for now, with operators connecting through an API key it issued. The company said it plans to bring the protocol to other high-throughput blockchains after Ethereum.
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