Crypto loves to brag about “ex‑FAANG devs”, but Optimum’s non‑professor founders are on a slightly different difficulty level. You’ve got Dr. Kishori Konwar — hardcore distributed systems + coding theory at MIT, then real‑world engineering at places like Meta, i.e. the kind of person who actually cares how protocols behave under packet loss, adversarial peers and ugly network topologies, not just in pretty diagrams. And then Kent Lin — ex‑President of the Harvard Blockchain Club, ex‑partner at a $4B VC, someone who’s spent years watching infra pitches and learning exactly why most of them quietly die once they meet validators, node operators and incentives. The result is a funny combo: Kishori optimizes for provable performance and resilience, Kent optimizes for “can this ship into L1/L2 clients and not get yeeted by production teams?”. Together with Médard you get a team that thinks like telecom engineers, executes like Web2, and memes like Web3 — which is probably the only way you convince Ethereum’s largest node operators to actually run a brand‑new p2p stack. 🚀 @MurielMedard @sajidazouarhi @blockchainjeff @kentlinyy @samurai_itan @URozmej @__flcl #Optimum #Web3Infra #RLNC #CryptoFounders #MIT #Harvard #Scalability #Ethereum #Onchain #CryptoResearch