LarOs

11,700 $ETH in 11 hours: An analysis of Ethereum block rewards on 10/30/26. On the day before Halloween things were already getting spooky onchain. Hackers stole billions from Binance and used Ethereum to move a large portion of the looted coins. However, they weren't the only ones cashing in that day. This activity and its ripple effects through the markets created some extraordinarily valuable blockspace, with single bids as high as 501 ETH going into the pockets of proposers. For context a full 24 hours of bids typically adds up to 100-150 ETH. Keeping with the Halloween theme, proposing a block during this period was like trick-or-treating in the neighborhood that gives out full size candy bars. Our research team set out to answer 2 questions: - How did mump2p perform during this volatile period? - How much additional ETH could validators have captured if they had fully leveraged mump2p’s speed advantage? 1. Block propagation via mump2p maintained its performance advantage over Gossipsub. During the 11 hour hack period mump2p’s average p95 latency advantage was 253ms, in line with the advantage seen both pre and post-hack. The percentage of blocks accelerated was similarly stable, 90% during the hack period vs. 89% before and after. 2. Proposers running mump2p have an edge when it comes to capturing higher bids, since they can safely delay their bid selection thanks to the time saved on propagation. This being the case, we wanted to find out how much extra ETH validators could have captured if they delayed their bid selection by 200ms. Results: Across 3,100 blocks during the hack period, delaying bid selection by 200ms would have yielded an average of about .15 extra ETH per block. This works out to a total of over 460 ETH during the hack period, and in dollar terms that’s over $1 million left on the table. Concluding Thoughts: MEV is highly variable. When things get crazy onchain block rewards can spike massively, allowing proposers to capture large amounts of ETH on single blocks. They can leverage Optimum’s speed advantage to extend their bid selection cutoff, and doing so will often result in seeing a higher bid. Speed is money, especially during these sort of tail events like hacks and extreme market volatility.

Job's not finished.

Meet Optimum's Crypto Trading and Markets Lead, Gary Pike! Speed is money in the trading world, and Gary knows firsthand from his time trading options in the NYMEX pit before making the jump to crypto in 2017. His crypto career includes Head of Trading roles at B2C2, Blocktower Capital, and Stillman Digital, with a focus on arbitrage and HFT strategies. Now he's leading the build out of Optimum's trading products, designing ways to get our ultra low-latency data delivery into the hands of traders. Bonus fun fact, Gary played college football for Nebraska, where he also got his degree in astrophysics.

What is mump2p?