Former Solana Strategy Head is Building the ‘New Internet’ for Blockchains

DoubleZero:- When people talk about scaling blockchains, they obsess over computation – faster nodes, better hardware, parallel execution. But Austin Federa, former Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation, thinks everyone is solving the wrong bottleneck.

“Blockchains are only as fast as the internet that connects their validators. And that internet – the public internet – was never designed for this.”

That’s why after leaving Solana in 2024, Federa founded DoubleZero, a project that doesn’t build blockchains – it builds the network beneath them. Not Layer 1 or Layer 2. Think: Layer 0.5 – bandwidth. “We’re not solving compute. We’re solving connectivity,” he says.

The Hidden Infrastructure Nobody Talks About

In blockchains, latency equals to money.Validators with faster message propagation earn more. Traders with quicker transaction settlement capture more. RPC providers with lower packet loss retain customers.

“Latency wars” have long been played behind closed doors by HFT firms. Now DoubleZero is bringing that model to crypto – but keeping it open-source, permissionless, and censorship-resistant.

Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Flashbots, and high-frequency trading firms have quietly spent billions building private fiber lines just to get 3 milliseconds of advantage.

Federa believes “If the most powerful AI labs and trading firms don’t trust the public internet… why do blockchains?”

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That’s what DoubleZero is building. It’s building a blockchain-coordinated marketplace where existing fiber owners contribute capacity. With this, it is forming a censorship-resistant, liquidity-routed bandwidth network optimized for low latency and validator throughput.

Within only a week of its mainnet launch, 20% of Solana’s total stake — over 250 validators across 25+ cities — are already routing through DoubleZero’s network. Speed on DoubleZero routes is reported to be significantly faster than public internet pathways — because the routing isn’t optimized for general use — it’s purpose-specific internet.

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Towards Decentralized Internet?

The “decentralized web” still runs on centralized, privately owned fiber controlled by 15 telecom giants. All of crypto (validators, dApps, wallets, nodes) runs on the public internet, which is controlled by a small number of telecoms and governments. They can switch off access anytime – like recentlyAfghanistan did blocking many Ethereum users out of access.

Traditional private fiber networks (used by Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Flashbots, etc.) are centralized — controlled by one company each DoubleZero’s parallel internet made from independent contributors can offer help as they share and link their private fiber lines and bandwidth. It’s not dependent on public carriers like Verizon, Airtel, or state ISPs.

Everyone assumes the internet is just… there but according to Austin are all optimized for Netflix, not validator consensus or MEV arbitrage.

So in real-world terms, Ethereum validators in Afghanistan could switch from using Taliban-controlled ISPs to DoubleZero’s fiber network contributed by providers in Dubai, India, Europe, and Turkey.

Even if the government blocks country-level ISP gateways, they can’t shut down private cross-border fiber links hidden within the DoubleZero contributor mesh. This would give blockchains & users a fallback layer — a crypto-native internet backbone, not dependent on centralized telecoms.

Thus, Afghanistan’s Ethereum blackout shows why Web3 needs its own roads – not just better cars.

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