After 15 years of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is ready for commercialization in the Web3 industry, according to Muriel Médard, an MIT professor and founder of blockchain infrastructure developer Optimum.

Optimum emerged from stealth on Feb. 28 as a decentralized memory infrastructure that can be utilized by any blockchain seeking to bring scalability to Web3. It utilizes the RLNC technology that was first formulated by Professor Médard. 

RLNC is a breakthrough in coding that is already used in the 5G, satellite telecommunications and Internet of Things (IoT) industries. 

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Professor Médard said RLNC is equivalent to “breaking a puzzle into small pieces, mixing those pieces together into equations, and sending them to your friends.”

“Even if a few pieces get lost, your friends can still put the whole puzzle together from the pieces they receive. Rather than look for specific pieces, you look for just enough pieces,” she said.

RLNC technology can help blockchains overcome “critical bottlenecks in scalability” by “encoding data into mathematical equations, enabling faster transmission, reduced bandwidth usage, lower barriers to entry for flexnodes and more reliable delivery,” said Médard.

Médard founded Optimum with the help of Nancy Lynch, an adviser and co-inventor of the Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus, after “several years of witnessing the rise and maturation of Web3,” she said.

“[The] vision is to bring the efficiency of traditional computer memory (RAM) to decentralized networks, laying the foundation for a breakthrough in Web3 infrastructure.”
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