A Q&A With Austin Federa on DoubleZero

As blockchain ecosystems mature, the speed and efficiency of the infrastructure for nodes have become more than just technical considerations —they’re strategic imperatives. Leading the charge in this space is Austin Federa, former Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, who is gearing up to launch DoubleZero, a protocol designed to redefine how blockchains communicate and scale.

In a wide-ranging conversation with CoinDesk, Federa delved into the motivations behind DoubleZero, the challenges it addresses and that may come out of it, and why its vision for a high-performance networking layer could be the foundation for the next generation of decentralized systems.

DoubleZero was first announced in December 2024 as a blockchain layer aimed to be faster than the internet and therefore crucial for crypto trades. Since then nearly 12.57% of SOL staked is operating on the DoubleZero testnet. The mainnet launch is expected to happen sometime in September.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CoinDesk: Explain how DoubleZero works to someone who is new to crypto.

Austin Federa: I think one of the easiest ways to explain what we’re building is we’re building crypto’s version of Flash Boys.

That really was this transformational moment where people kind of realized that your edge in execution on a centralized trading venue, was no longer your actual trade logic or the speed of the computer that you have hooked up to the market, it is how quickly you can get data between different points where market events occur. That was kind of a really big change in the industry, because transit time was not [previously] considered to be terribly important.

You can go back and watch Formula 1 races from the 80s, they’re just taking a cigarette break during a pit stop, and then someone realized “oh man, we’re actually leaving a lot of time on the track by these pit stops not being optimized.” And it really is something quite similar in the trading space.

So for crypto, the idea of using something that’s faster than the public internet (that you can use a network that you can use technologies on that are not available on the public internet), it’s not necessarily a new idea. The problem was, until DoubleZero came along, it would have to have been run by one centralized company and not allow for multiple independent contributors.

The main technology, philosophy and economic unlock of the DoubleZero protocol is that it allows multiple contributors that have their own fiber networks to contribute portions or all of that fiber network to the DoubleZero network. It builds a giant, extremely high performance fiber mesh network that connects people all around the world.

CoinDesk: Why build for Solana?

Federa: We’re not actually built on Solana. We do have a separate ledger system, but it’s not a network that anyone ever deploys a smart contract to, it really is just an accounting database.

The reason that we’re supporting Solana first…is because Solana is pretty unique. If you look at fast blockchains, and then you look at node count, there’s a ratio of transactions per second to number of nodes, no one comes even close to Solana.

Any network that is anywhere near the performance of Solana has a 1/5th to a 1/10th of the number of actual nodes. And so the communications 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 the communication becomes a bottleneck.

So the bigger and the faster you get a blockchain network, the more communication becomes a bottleneck for that network moving quickly. And so the real goal behind what we’re doing is to allow blockchains to go faster than the public internet, without having to drop node count or add centralization.

We think DoubleZero has a lot more applications than just Solana, and a lot more applications than just blockchain. But it is the place where there’s the biggest need at the moment. You look at the other blockchains out there, and they just don’t have these problems yet.

CoinDesk: How does staking on Solana tie to DoubleZero?

Federa: We have a stake pool that is staking to nodes on DoubleZero. As a percentage of stake, it’s quite small, it’s about 3 million SOL, (there’s 500 million SOL), so it’s not a huge amount of SOL. That was originally conceived of as a way to help subsidize the cost of validators running on our testnet, but turned out people were just very interested in running on testnet, and so that’s been a really nice tool for getting more people on board with the network.

When we launch mainnet data in September, that’s going to be over 50 different fiber links right now. Currently its at eight. Many of the links will be 10 times faster than the connections that we have today in terms of their capacity. So going from 10 gigabit to 200 gigabit connections.

We see a future where, when you get enough stake operating on the DoubleZero network, protocol designers at Solana are now able to jack up limits way higher than they can on the public internet, because there’s more capacity offered on DoubleZero than is available to validators operating on the public internet today, and it’s a lower latency connection. So the data transmission actually, not only can you send more data, but that data arrives more quickly 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 get something done faster, quicker, or other benefits for your trade, you go the DoubleZero route. Does that then create a performance inequality between validators on Solana?

Federa: We get a version of this [question] a lot. And the question to ask yourself is, is the internet a centralizing force? The internet is basically just 20 companies that have most of the connectivity. And today if all of the OECD countries suddenly said, “no more crypto,” basically everything but bitcoin is hosed.

So when we’re honest about what we’re feeling about here, the importance is not to get rid of the internet entirely. It is to make sure the internet is there as a fallback, as a censorship resistance path. And so if DoubleZero is offline, or if there is a bad actor in the DoubleZero network that decides to try and censor blocks or something along with censored data moving through it, two things will happen:

One, this is why we have nine independent contributors on the network, so data will just route around them, and we can basically kick a contributor off the network. And the second thing is, we always have the public internet to fall back on. Now that may require Solana dropping from 500,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second. But that’s not a bad failback state.

That’s kind of your classic, “there’s a traffic jam on the highway, I’ll take the county road at the moment.”

CoinDesk: So mainnet is coming very soon. What’s happening between now and then?

Federa: It’s a lot of testing, it’s a lot of making sure that we’re fully ready to go. And then it’s obviously a token-based project. So there is a token launch that will go along with that as well, also in the month of September.

Read more: DoubleZero’s ‘New Internet’ for Blockchains Nabs $400M Valuation from Top Crypto VCs