DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by Austin Federa, former director of the Solana Foundation, is rolling out a major update aimed at spreading Solana’s network more evenly around the world and making 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 pool of 13 million 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 participation incentives.
DoubleZero runs a dedicated high-speed Internet network that allows Solana’s computers to communicate with each other faster and more reliably. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million at a valuation of $400 million.
DoubleZero’s goal in deploying this incentive is simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic focus 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 blockchain accelerating is that there is more incentive to locate next to each other,” Federa said in an interview. He likened it to the early high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when companies raced to place their servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds off trades.
Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: Q&A with Austin Federa on DoubleZero
Today, a large portion of the tokens staked by Solana, which secure the network, are located in Central Europe – largely for historical and economic reasons. “There were a lot of very good, very cheap bare metal data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana has been optimized for this type of accommodation from the beginning, and the infrastructure has just been built there.”
But geographic clustering creates trade-offs: if most validators are in Europe, users further afield may be at a disadvantage.
“If I’m in South America and I’m trying to execute a transaction on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who owns a computer in Germany could actually win this exchange.”
To address this imbalance, DoubleZero is offering 2.4 million SOL and aims to make validator activity outside of traditional hubs economically viable.
“More reliable”
The next problem that DoubleZero is trying to solve with this new initiative is data transmission latency.
The main obstacle to expansion in these areas is not technical, Federa said, but rather economic. “Because you’re further away, everything takes longer to arrive. 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 solve connectivity issues, while the new delegation incentives aim to offset the economic penalty of being outside traditional hubs.
That’s why, along with the geo push, DoubleZero is introducing multicast functionality to Solana.
Federa compared it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite rather than streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of people can watch this radio wave…and it’s not an additional tax.” In contrast, streaming requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Today, blockchain networks operate largely like streaming services: they send duplicate data over and over again. Multicast, he says, changes that.
“In a pre-multicast world, if I send data to 1,000 nodes, I distribute 1,000 copies of it,” he said. “With multicast, I send a copy and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go. »
This reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in how quickly participants receive data, and creates more room for future upgrades. It also allows blockchain infrastructure to behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicast.
“Traditional finance is not only faster than blockchain, it is more reliable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to blockchain networking, it will make 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, bringing it closer to functioning as a true real-time market.
Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet goes live with 22% SOL staked on board
