As blockchain -ecosystems grow up, the speed and efficiency of the infrastructure for nodes have become more than just technical considerations – they are strategic imperatives. The management of the load in this space is Austin Federa, former main strategy at the Solana Foundation, who is preparing to launch Doublezero, a protocol that is designed to define again how blockchains communicate and scales.
In a wide conversation with Coindesk, Federa dived into the motivations behind Doublezero, the challenges it tackles and that can come out, and why the vision of a powerful network layer could be the basis for the next generation of decentralized systems.
Doublezero was first announced in December 2024 as a blockchain layer that was aimed at faster than the internet and therefore crucial for crypto transactions. Since then, nearly 12.57% of Sol Stusted has been working on the Doublezero Testnet. The Mainstet launch is expected to take place somewhere in September.
This interview has been edited for concise and clarity.
Coindesk: Explain how Doublezero works on someone who is new to Crypto.
Austin Federa: I think one of the easiest ways to explain what we are building is that we are building Cryptto’s version of Flash Boys.
That was really this transformational moment when people realized a bit that your lead in progress on a centralized trading location was no longer your actual trading logic or the speed of the computer that you have connected to the market, it is how quickly your data can get where market events take place where market events take place. That was a kind of a very big change in industry, because it was not [previously] considered terribly important.
You can go back and view Formula 1 races from the 80s, they just take a cigarette break during a pit stop, and then someone realized: “Oh man, we actually leave a lot of time on the track because of these pit stops that are not optimized.” And it is really something very similar in the commercial space.
So for Crypto, the idea to use something that is faster than the public internet (that you can use a network on which you can use technologies that is not available on the public internet), it is not necessarily a new idea. The problem was that until Doublezero came, it should be run by one centralized company and would not allow any more independent contributors.
The most important technology, philosophy and economic unlocking of the Doublezero protocol is that the multiple contributors enable their own fiber networks to contribute or contribute all that fiber network to the Doublezero network. It builds a huge, extremely high -performance fiber mesh network that connects people around the world.
Coindesk: Why build for Solana?
Federa: We are not really built on Solana. We do have a separate ledger system, but it is not a network for which someone ever uses a smart contract, it is really just a accounting database.
The reason we first support Solana is because Solana is quite unique. If you look at fast block chains and then you look at the number of nodes, there is a ratio of transactions per second and number of nodes, nobody even comes close to Solana.
Every network that is somewhere near Solana’s performance has a 1/5th to a 1/10 of the number of actual nodes. And so the communication problem is an exponential problem. The more nodes you have in the system, and the more places you need to get data, the more bandwidth you need, the more communication becomes a bottleneck.
So the bigger and the faster you get a blockchain network, the more communication becomes a bottleneck for that network that moves quickly. And so the real goal behind what we do is to let block chains go faster than the public internet, without dropping the number of node or adding centralization.
We think that Doublezero has many more applications than just Solana, and many more applications than just blockchain. But it is the place where the greatest need is currently. You look at the other block chains that are there, and they just don’t have these problems yet.
Coiindek: How is it going on Solana on Doublezero?
Federa: We have a stake pool that is looking for junctions on Doublezero. If a percentage of the importance, it is quite small, it is around 3 million sol, there is 500 million sol), so it is not a huge amount of SOL. That was originally conceived as a way to subsidize the costs of validators on our test network, but it turned out that people were simply very interested in running on TestNet, and that was a very nice tool to get more people on board with the network.
When we start Mainstet data in September, it will now be more than 50 different fiber optic couplings. Currently it is eight. Many of the links will be 10 times faster than the connections we have today in terms of their capacity. So go from 10 gigabit to 200 gigabit connections.
We see a future in which, when you get enough interest to work on the Doublezero network, protocol designers at Solana are now able to increase the limits that are much higher than they can on the public internet, because more capacity is offered on Doublezero than available for validators who are active on public internet today and it is a lower latent deposit. So you can not only send the data transfer more data, but that data arrives faster than usual.
Coindesk: So in your world there are two scenarios here: you have the public internet, or you have something like a double zero. If you want to have the Double Zeror Route do a little faster, faster, faster or other benefits for your trade. Does that create an inequality between validators on Solana?
Federa: We get a version of this [question] a lot of. And the question of asking yourself is the internet a centralizing force? The internet is actually only 20 companies that have most of the connectivity. And today, when all OECD countries suddenly said, “No more crypto”, in principle anything but Bitcoin is closed.
So if we are honest about what we feel here, the importance is not to lose the internet completely. It is to ensure that the internet is there like a fallback, like 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 to censor blocks or something with censored data that go through, two things will happen:
Firstly, we have nine independent contributors on the network, so data will simply run around them and in principle we can make a contribution from the network. And the second is that we always have the public internet to fall back. Now Solana can fall from 500,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second. But that is not a bad failback.
That is a bit of your classic: “There is a traffic jam on the highway, I am taking the provincial road at the moment.”
Coiindek: So Maving is coming very soon. What happens between now and then?
Federa: It is a lot of testing, it is a lot to ensure that we are completely ready to go. And then it is clearly a token-based project. So there is a token launch that will also merge, also in the month of September.
Read more: ‘New Internet’ from Doublezero for Blockchains Nabs $ 400M Rating from Top Crypto VCS