DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation director Austin Federa, is rolling out a major update that aims to spread Solana’s network more evenly around the world and make it faster in the process.
On March 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, redirecting 2.4 million SOL from its 13 million pool to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Each region will receive up to 600,000 SOL in additional delegated effort incentives.
DoubleZero runs a dedicated high-speed Internet network that helps Solana’s computers talk to each other faster and more reliably. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million for a $400 million valuation.
DoubleZero’s goal in rolling out the incentive is simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic concentration in Europe and introduce “multicast functionality,” a data distribution method widely used in traditional finance.
Geographic cluster
One of Federa’s main goals is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.
“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains getting faster is that there is more incentive to co-locate next to each other,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to early high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, where firms tried to place servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds off trades.
Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: A Q&A With Austin Federa on DoubleZero
Today, a large part of Solana’s staked tokens, which secure the network, sit in Central Europe – mainly for historical and economic reasons. “There were a lot of really good, really cheap bare-metal data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized early on for this kind of hosting, and the infrastructure has just been built there.”
But geographical clustering creates trade-offs: if most validators are in Europe, users further away may be at a disadvantage.
“If I’m sitting in South America and trying to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who has a computer in Germany can actually win that trade.”
To address this imbalance, DoubleZero is offering 2.4 million SOL and aims to make it economically viable for validators to operate outside of traditional hubs.
‘More reliable’
The next problem DoubleZero is trying to solve through the new initiative is data transmission latency.
The biggest barrier to expanding into these areas isn’t technical, Federa said — it’s financial. “Because you’re farther away, everything takes longer to get there. It’s like Amazon Prime — in New York, you get it the same day. In Montana, it’s four or five days.”
DoubleZero says its private fiber network helps address connectivity issues, while the new delegation incentives aim to offset the financial penalty of being outside traditional hubs.
That’s why, alongside the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing the multicast functionality to Solana.
Federa compared it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of people can see that radio wave … and it’s no extra tax.” Streaming, on the other hand, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Blockchain networks today function largely like streaming services – sending duplicate data over and over again. Multicast, he said, changes that.
“In a pre-multicast world, if I send data to 1,000 nodes, I’m giving out 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send a copy and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”
It reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in how quickly participants receive data, and creates more room for future upgrades. It also makes blockchain infrastructure behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicast.
“Traditional finance isn’t just faster than blockchain — it’s more reliable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to blockchain networks, it makes it a much more attractive place for market makers and traders.”
Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that financial incentives like this will help Solana’s infrastructure spread globally and move it closer to operating as a true real-time marketplace.
Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet goes live with 22% of staked SOL onboard
