DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation director Austin Federa, 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 people $SOL from the pool of 13 million to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Each region will receive a maximum of 600,000 $SOL in additional delegated stake incentives.
DoubleZero operates a private, 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 $400 million valuation.
DoubleZero’s goal in rolling out this 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 objectives is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.
“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains becoming faster is that there are more incentives to collaborate side by side,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to early, high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when companies rushed to move servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds of trades.
Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: A Q&A with Austin Federa on DoubleZero
Today, many of Solana’s deployed tokens, which secure its 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 was optimized early on for that type of hosting and the infrastructure was just built there.”
But geographic clustering poses tradeoffs: if most validators are in Europe, users further away may be at a disadvantage.
“If I’m in South America and I’m trying to make a transaction on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who has a computer in Germany might 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 traditional hubs.
‘More reliable’
The next problem that DoubleZero is trying to solve with the new initiative is data transfer latency.
The main barrier to expansion into these areas is not technical, Federa said, but economic. “Because you’re further away, it all 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 will help address connectivity issues, while the new delegation incentives aim to offset the economic impact of being outside traditional hubs.
This is why, in addition to the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing multicast functionality to Solana.
Federa likened it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of people can watch that radio wave… and there is no additional tax.” Streaming, on the other hand, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Blockchain networks today operate largely like streaming services: they send duplicate data over and over again. Multicast, he said, is changing that.
“In a pre-multicast world, if I send data to 1,000 nodes, I’m handing out 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send one copy, and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”
That 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 financing is not only faster than blockchain – it is also more reliable,” said Federa. “If we can add more determinism to blockchain networks, it will become a much more attractive place for market makers and traders.”
Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that these types of financial incentives 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% of the stake $SOL on board