Optimum, an MIT-incubated startup co-founded by network coding pioneer Muriel Médard, has launched its private testnet. Backed by 1kx and others, the project aims to build Web3’s missing memory layer — starting with RLNC-powered data propagation that boosts speed, reduces redundancy and will reward even lightweight nodes for their contribution to network performance.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 10 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

Maple Finance is cooking:

Lending protocol Maple Finance is racking up record-high TVL numbers at $934m, as of yesterday.

That translates to about $1.3m in year-to-date revenues, or ~$4.1m annualized. Revenues are generated from loan fees to institutional borrowers and management fees on its BTC liquid staking product (lstBTC).

“Maple’s expansion into institutional asset management complements its existing institutional borrowing product offering and expands its market opportunity materially,” Theia Research’s Noah told me.

In Maple-related news, Spark protocol also just  announced an integration with Maple and a $50m allocation into SyrupUSDC, Maple’s yield-bearing stablecoin backed by overcollateralized loans to institutional borrowers.

— Donovan Choy

Permissionless IV is where the builders show up — devs, founders, protocol teams, product minds. No waiting on the next bull. Just shipping.

The lineup: Jesse Pollak, Hayden Adams, Kain Warwick, Mert Mumtaz, Smokey the Bera + more.

The themes: Infra, AI x crypto, modular, DeFi, consumer apps, Bitcoin, token design.

💻 Hackathon: $100K+ in bounties

🎟️ Developer tickets available

📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY

MIT-spun startup is the new gossip

Blockchain networks have long styled themselves as “decentralized world computers” ever since Ethereum, but one key component of modern computing has been missing: memory. Now, with the launch of its private testnet this week, MIT-incubated startup Optimum is taking a first step toward fixing that.

Founded by MIT professor and renowned network coding researcher Muriel Médard, Optimum aims to build a high-performance memory layer for blockchains. Starting with data propagation, and eventually tackling what amounts to decentralized RAM, its core innovation is based on Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), a technique Médard has been refining for over two decades.

Unlike typical gossip-based peer-to-peer systems — where nodes redundantly forward packets — RLNC uses coded data packets that increase bandwidth efficiency and resilience. In private tests and academic research, the technique has shown up to 20x improvements in propagation bandwidth and 2x gains in speed, with flexible tradeoffs depending on application needs, according to the team.

The first tests with validator node operators are now underway, part of the team’s broader go-to-market strategy, Médard told Blockworks.

“We have signed multiple MOUs with large node operators,” Médard said. The private testnet is invite-only and an opportunity for operators to validate performance and help shape product direction.

OptimumP2P, the protocol's first product, replaces traditional gossip protocols like libp2p with a pub-sub (publish-subscribe) that functions more like a memory bus in traditional computing. The technique could have obvious advantages such as faster block propagation, reduced mempool congestion and better performance for validators, RPC providers and even DEX operators.

Some of these improvements go straight to an operator’s bottom line. But eventually, Optimum will be geared toward small players too. It plans to introduce a utility token to reward nodes — called “flex nodes” — for contributing to data propagation and, eventually, memory access, with rewards proportional to the useful work they perform, regardless of uptime or stake.

“Almost all blockchain innovation has focused on compute and execution,” Médard said. “But without fast, reliable data access and propagation, blockchains can’t function as true high-speed computing networks.”

Optimum’s blockchain-agnostic approach has already attracted significant backing, most recently an $11 million seed round led by 1kx and included investors like Robot Ventures, CMT Digital, Spartan and Finality Capital. 

That focus on practical performance improvements has caught the attention of other infrastructure teams, including data availability providers like Avail.

Prabal Banerjee, co-founder of Avail, noted the potential relevance of RLNC to its roadmap.

“RLNC and its application to optimizing P2P is interesting to us,” Banerjee told Blockworks, though adding it needs further review. “At this stage we are exploring multiple avenues to optimize the network for 10GB blocks based on the strategy outlined in our scaling roadmap.”

In principle, Avail’s data layer, which aims to scale horizontally to "infinity blocks," could benefit from more efficient network-level coding strategies — something Optimum’s team is hoping to make broadly available.

Although not live yet, Médard says a memory layer (rather than just a bus) is coming later this year. It can be thought of as a decentralized RAM substrate with what are known in CS parlance as ACID guarantees (atomicity, consistency, durability) to significantly lower latency and replication cost over current DA or archival solutions.

For now, Optimum is focusing on perfecting its memory bus. And in an environment where even the fastest rollups and L1s are still bottlenecked by propagation lag, that might be exactly what the world computer needs.

— Macauley Peterson

Upshift yields

Upshift, the latest yield platform by prime brokerage firm August, is currently offering some eyebrow-raising yields on some of its vaults.

15 days after its public launch, Upshift has attracted $279m in deposits, according to its website. August raised $10m in a Series A round led by Dragonfly Ventures in early April.

The “Sylva Concentrated Liquidity” vault curated by Sylva.money on Ethereum is currently offering 27% on USDC deposits, in addition to Upshift points. Yes, that is 27% on a stablecoin. However, an estimate of historical APY numbers (by calling the ERC-4626 convertToAssets function at historical blocks) has shown wild volatility, which implies unsustainability.

The yield is derived from a basis trade: concentrated liquidity exposure to the Aerodrome and Velodrome DEXs, as well as a short position on the Deribit options CEX. Before you ape, mind the three-day withdrawal period.

A more conservative option also on Ethereum is the “Upshift USDC” vault, curated by August themselves. This vault is offering 7.2% APY on USDC deposits with a shorter withdrawal period of 24 hours. Like above, note the exposure to more than a dozen assets and protocols.

— Donovan Choy