The post Cracking Ethereum’s networking bottleneck – Blockworks appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

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. Powered by Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), the system — called mumP2P — is already showing major gains on Ethereum’s Hoodi testnet. Early tests by validator giant Everstake confirm a 5–6x speedup over today’s standard Gossipsub relay. Running mumP2P, “right now an average block propagation time is like 150 milliseconds,” Everstake COO Bohdan “Bo” Opryshko told Blockworks. For large validator sets, Opryshko emphasized, those speed gains aren’t cosmetic: “If somebody can transfer data faster, if you can sign block faster…you can mitigate the risk around missing blocks. That means less missing block, more rewards for users, and more rewards for [validators],” Opryshko said. Boosted yields compound at scale. “It could be small [1 bip], for example,” he said, but on large amounts of ether staked, it nevertheless can be a substantial nominal sum. Ethereum’s staking yields have seen steady compression since The Merge, Blockworks Research data shows. Source: Blockworks Research Optimum co-founder Muriel Médard, the MIT professor behind RLNC, is enthusiastic about improving Ethereum’s current networking stack. “[Gossipsub] has a lot of redundancy [but] it’s very, very bandwidth hungry, and it really slows down under stress,” Médard told Blockworks. Optimum’s solution aims to replace it with a smarter relay that looks like Gossipsub on the outside, but codes data under the hood to streamline transmission. Médard explained that unlike traditional peer-to-peer relays, which resend the same data repeatedly, mumP2P uses coded packets — mathematical equations that are almost always new — allowing nodes to transmit information more efficiently and with less duplication. Importantly, Everstake’s Opryshko said his team hasn’t encountered any meaningful overhead costs from running mumP2P. “It’s not significant compared with…

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Filed under: News - @ September 23, 2025 6:29 pm