As blockchain ecosystems mature, the speed and efficiency of the infrastructure for nodes have become more than technical considerations – these are strategic imperatives. Austin Federa, former official of the Solana Foundation strategy, who is preparing to launch DoubleZero, a protocol designed to redefine the way the blockchains communicate and scalins.
In a wide conversation with Coindesk, Federa has plunged into the motivations behind Doublezero, the challenges he takes up and this could get out of it, and why his vision of a high performance networking could be the foundation of the next generation of decentralized systems.
DoubleZero was announced for the first time in December 2024 as a layer of blockchain aimed at being faster than the Internet and therefore crucial for cryptographic trades. Since then, nearly 12.57% STAKED floor has operated on the DoubleZero Testnet. The launch of the Mainnet should occur in September.
This interview was modified by Brevity and Clarity.
Coindesk: Explain how DoubleZero works on someone who is new in the crypto.
Austin Federa: I think one of the simplest ways to explain what we are building is that we build the version of Crypto by Flash Boys.
It was really this transformational moment when people have somehow realized that your advantage in the execution at a centralized trading location, was no longer your real commercial logic or the speed of the computer that you connected to the market, it is how speed you can get data between different points where market events occur. It was a very big change in industry, because the transit time was not [previously] considered terribly important.
You can go back and look at the Formula 1 races of the 80s, they only take a break at the cigarette during a stand stop, then someone made “Oh Mec, we actually leave a lot of time on the track by these stops at the stands which are not optimized.” And it’s really something quite similar in the commercial space.
So for crypto, the idea of using something faster than the public internet (that you can use a network on which you can use technologies that are not available on public internet)It is not necessarily a new idea. The problem was that, until the arrival of Doublezero, it should have been managed by a centralized company and not authorize several independent contributors.
The main technology, the philosophy and the economic unlocking of the DoubleZero protocol is that it allows several contributors who have their own fiber networks to contribute parts or all of this network of fibers to the DoubleZero network. It builds a giant fiber fiber network of giant performance that connects people from around the world.
Coindesk: Why build for Solana?
Federa: We are not really built on Solana. We have a system of large separate book, but it is not a network to which anyone deploys an intelligent contract, it is really only a accounting database.
The reason we support Solana first… is because Solana is quite unique. If you look at the fast blockchains, then you look at the number of nodes, there is a second transaction report to a number of nodes, no one even approaches Solana.
Any network which is close to Solana’s performance has a 1 / 5th to a 1/10 in the number of real nodes. And so the communication problem is an exponential problem. The more nodes in the system, the more places you need to get data, the more bandwidth you need, the more communication becomes a bottleneck.
Thus, the more you get a larger and faster blockchain network, the more communication becomes a bottleneck for this network moving rapidly. And so the real goal behind what we do is allow blockchains to go faster than the public internet, without having to drop the number of nodes or add centralization.
We believe that DoubleZero has many more applications than Solana, and many more applications than simple blockchain. But this is the place where there is the greatest need right now. You look at the other blockchains there, and they just don’t have these problems yet.
Coindesk: How is the stain on Solana linked to DoubleZero?
Federa: We have a stake pool that punctuates the nodes on DoubleZero. As a percentage of participation, it is quite small, it is around 3 million floors, (there are 500 million soil)So it’s not a huge amount of soil. This was originally designed as a way to help subsidize the cost of validators in progress on our Testnet, but it turned out that people were simply interested in operating on Testnet, and this was therefore a very nice tool to bring more people with the network.
When we launch Mainnet data in September, it will be more than 50 different fiber links at the moment. Currently, it’s eight. Many links will be 10 times faster than the connections that we have today in terms of capacity. Going from 10 gigabit to 200 Gigabit connections.
We see a future where, when you get enough participation operating on the Doublezero network, Solana protocol designers are now able to raise much higher limits than they can on the public Internet, because there is more capacity offered on DoubleZero than for validators operating on public internet today, and it is a lower latency connection. Thus, the transmission of data in fact, not only can you send more data, but this data arrives faster than it would otherwise.
Coindesk: 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 do something faster, faster or other advantages for your job, you take the Doublezero route. Does this create an inequality of performance between the validators on Solana?
Federa: We get a version of this [question] a lot. And the question to ask you is: Is the Internet a centralization force? Internet is mainly only 20 companies that have most of connectivity. And today, if all the OECD countries suddenly said: “no more crypto”, essentially anything but Bitcoin is watered.
So when we are honest on what we feel here, the importance is not to get rid of the Internet completely. It is a question of ensuring that the Internet is there as a help, as a way of resistance to censorship. And so if Doublezero is offline, or if there is a bad actor in the Doublezero network which decides to try to censor the blocks or something with censored data that cross it, two things will happen:
First, this is why we have nine independent contributors on the network, so the data will simply bypass it, and we can mainly launch a contribution to the network. And the second thing is that we always have public internet to fall back on. Now this may require a solara drop of 500,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second. But it is not a bad failure state.
It is sort of classic, “there is a traffic jam on the highway, I will take the road to the county at the moment.”
Coindesk: So Mainnet arrives very soon. What’s going on by then?
Federa: These are a lot of tests, it is a lot of time that we are fully ready to leave. And then it is obviously a project based on tokens. So there is a launch of a token that will also go with this, also in September.
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