‘Scale or fail’: RLNC technology can boost Web3 adoption — MIT Professor

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.

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RLNC’s potential use case in Web3 has attracted notable backers, several of whom invested in Optimum as angel investors. They include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Wormhole co-founder Robinson Burkey, Polychain chief technology officer Abhijeet Mahagaonkar, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen and Arthur Cheong, the founder and CEO of DeFiance Capital.

Professor Médard told Cointelegraph that scalability breakthroughs in Web3 are needed, especially as blockchain adoption continues to grow for the “purposes of payments, financial instruments and even diversification of national government strategies.”

“We believe this trend will continue, and as usage and demand increase, blockchains will need to scale or they will fail,” she said. 

Scalability remains one of the industry’s biggest bottlenecks, having plagued the development of both Bitcoin and Ethereum at various points over their history. Competing networks have vowed to fix scalability issues stemming from mass consumer adoption, though their track record has been far from perfect. 

Against this backdrop, the crypto payments landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, shifting from tokens to stablecoins that are much faster and cheaper. 

Stablecoins have emerged as one of blockchain’s most popular use cases, especially for payments and cross-border remittances. Source: DefiLlama

An August report by wealth manager Bernstein said Solana is a leading network for stablecoin adoption, but even it struggles to scale with growing payment and remittance demand.

Although Solana has piloted stablecoin payments with Visa and Shopify, it’s unclear whether the blockchain can facilitate mainstream adoption without a massive boost in capacity, Bernstein said. 

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