When blockchain ecosystems mature, the speed and efficiency of infrastructure have become more than just technical considerations – they are strategic imperatives. Leading the charge in this room is Austin Federa, former strategy manager at the Solana Foundation, who is ready to launch DoubleZero, a protocol designed to redefine how blockchains communicate and scale.
In a far -reaching conversation with Coindesk, Federa dives into the motivations behind Doublezero, the challenges it addresses and that can come out of it and why its vision for a high -performance network layer can be the basis of the next generation of decentralized systems.
DoubleZero was first announced in December 2024 as a blockchain layer aimed at being faster than the Internet and therefore crucial to crypto trader. Since then, almost 12.57% of the Sun -Staket works on DoubleZero test network. The Mainnet launch is expected to happen sometime in September.
This interview has been edited for briefness and clarity.
Coindsk: Explain how DoubleZero works to someone who is new to Crypto.
Austin Federa: I think one of the easiest ways of explaining what we are building is that we build Crypto’s version of Flash Boys.
It really was this moment of transformation where people kind of realized that your edge in execution at a centralized trading site was no longer your actual trade logic or the speed of your computer that you have connected to the market is how quickly you can get data between different points where market events occur. It was a bit of a really big change in the industry because transit time wasn’t [previously] considered to be very important.
You can go back and see Formula 1 runs from the 80s, they just take a cigarette break during a pit stop, and then someone realized “Oh man, we actually leave a lot of time on the field by these pit stopping not being optimized.” And it really is something that is very similar in the trade area.
So for crypto, the idea of using something that is faster than the public internet (that you can use a network on which you can use technologies that are not available on the public internet)It’s not necessarily a new idea. The problem was until Doublezero followed, it would have to have been driven by a centralized company and not allow for more independent contributors.
The most important technology, philosophy and economic unlocking the Doublezero protocol is that it allows more contributors who have their own fiber networks to contribute parts or all this fiber network to the DoubleZero network. It builds a huge, extremely high -performance fiber network that connects people all over the world.
Coindesk: Why build for Solana?
Federa: We are not actually built on Solana. We have a separate headbox system, but it’s not a network that anyone ever implements a smart contract for, it’s really just an accounting database.
The reason we support Solana first … is because Solana is pretty unique. If you look at fast blockchains and then you look at node counting, there is a relationship between transactions per day. Second and the number of nodes no one comes close to Solana.
Any network that is everywhere near the Solana performance has a 1/5 to a 1/10. of the number of actual nodes. And then the communication problem is an exponential problem. The more nodes you have in the system and the more places you need to get data to go, the more bandwidth you need, the more communication becomes a bottleneck.
So the bigger and faster you get a blockchain network, the more communication becomes a bottleneck for the network that moves quickly. And then the real goal behind what we are doing is to give Blockchains the opportunity to go faster than the public internet without having to drop nod count or add centralization.
We think DoubleZero has a lot more applications than just Solana, and much more applications than just blockchain. But this is the place where there is the greatest need at the moment. You look at the other blockchains out there and they just don’t have these problems yet.
Coindsk: How to bind inserted on Solana to Doublezero?
FEDERA: We have a stick pool that sets for nodes at Doublezero. As a percentage of the effort it is quite small, it’s about 3 million sun, (There is 500 million sun)So it’s not a huge amount of sun. It was originally conceived as a way to help subsidize the cost of validators running on our test network, but turned out that people were just very interested in driving on the test network, so it has been a really good tool to get more people on board the network.
When we launch Mainnet data in September, it will be over 50 different fiberlink right now. Currently it’s eight. Many of the links will be 10 times faster than the connections we have today in terms of their capacity. So to go from 10 gigabit to 200 gigabit compounds.
We see a future where Protocol Designers at Solana, when you get enough efforts operating on the DoubleZero network, is now able to link the boundaries far higher than they can on the public internet, because there is more capacity offered at DoubleZero than is available for validators operating on the public internet today and it is a lower latency period. So the data transfer actually, not only can you send more data, but this data arrives faster than they would otherwise do.
Coindsk: So in your world there are two scenarios here: You have the public internet or you have something like a doublezero. If you want to get something done faster, faster or other benefits for your trade, you go the double -zero route. Does it then create a performance inequality between validators on Solana?
Federa: We get a version of this [question] very. And the question of asking yourself is the Internet is a centralization force? The Internet is basically only 20 companies that have most of the connection. And today, if all the OECD countries suddenly said, “no more crypto”, basically everything, but Bitcoin is snake.
So when we are honest about what we feel about here, the importance is not to get rid of the internet completely. It is to ensure that the Internet is there as a relapse, like a censorship resistance. And then if DoubleZero is offline, or if there is a bad actor in the DoubleZero network who decides to try to censor blocks or something along with censored data moving through it, two things will happen:
One is therefore that we have nine independent contributors on the network, so data routes just around them and we can basically kick a contributor from the network. And the other thing is that we always have the public internet to fall back on. Now it may require Solana to fall from 500,000 transactions per year. Second to 10,000 transactions per second. Second. But it’s not a bad failback mode.
It’s kind of your classic, “There is a traffic jam on the highway, I’m taking the county road at the moment.”
Coindesk: So Mainnet comes very soon. What happens between now and then?
Federa: It’s a lot of testing, it’s a lot to make sure we’re fully ready to go. And then it’s obviously a token -based project. So there is a token launch that also comes with it, even in September.
Read more: DoubleZero ‘New Internet’ for Blockchains -Nabs $ 400 million.
