DoubleZero, the crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is rolling out a major update aimed at spreading Solana’s network more evenly around the world and speeding up the process.
On March 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero delegation program, redirecting 2.4 million people. $SOL From a pool of 13 million people to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each region will receive up to 600,000 $SOL With additional delegated staking incentives.
DoubleZero runs 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 this network raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation.
DoubleZero’s goal in deploying this incentive is simple. The idea is to reduce Solana’s geographic concentration in Europe and introduce “multicast capabilities,” a data distribution method widely used in traditional finance.
geographical cluster
One of Federa’s main goals is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.
“One of the unintended consequences of faster blockchains is that there is more incentive to colocate them next to each other,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to the early high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when companies scrambled to locate servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange in order to reduce trading times by milliseconds.
Read more: “Flash Boys of the Crypto”: Q&A with Austin Federa on DoubleZero
Currently, many of Solana’s staking tokens that secure the network are stored in Central Europe, primarily for historical and economic reasons. “Europe had a lot of very good, very cheap bare metal data centers,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized for that kind of hosting early on, and the infrastructure was just built there.”
However, geographic clustering comes with tradeoffs. If most validators are located in Europe, users who are far away may be at a disadvantage.
“If you’re sitting in South America and you’re trying to execute a trade in Solana, you can hit the send button first,” Federa said. “But whoever has a computer in Germany might actually win that deal.”
To address this imbalance, DoubleZero is providing $2.4 million $SOL We aim to make it economically viable for validators to operate outside of traditional hubs.
“More reliable”
The next problem that DoubleZero is trying to solve through its new initiative is data transmission delays.
Federa said the main barrier to entering these areas is not technological, but economic. “Everything takes a while to arrive because it’s so far away. It’s like Amazon Prime. In New York you get it the same day, but in Montana it takes four or five days.”
DoubleZero says that while its private fiber network will help solve connectivity issues, the new delegation incentives are aimed at offsetting the economic disadvantage of being outside of a traditional hub.
This is why, in parallel with the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing multicast capabilities to Solana.
Federa likened this to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus watching the Super Bowl via streaming. With satellites, “an infinite number of people can tune in to the airwaves…and there are no additional taxes.” Streaming, by contrast, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Today’s blockchain networks primarily operate like streaming services, sending duplicate data over and over again. Multicast changes that, he said.
“In the pre-multicast world, if you sent data to 1,000 nodes, you would distribute 1,000 copies,” he said. “You send one copy using multicast, and the network hardware replicates it closer to its destination.”
This reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in the speed at which participants receive data, and provides more room for future upgrades. Blockchain infrastructure also operates like a traditional exchange, relying heavily on multicast.
“Traditional finance is not only faster than blockchain, but also more reliable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to blockchain networking, it will become an even more attractive place for market makers and traders.”
Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that such financial incentives will help spread Solana’s infrastructure globally, allowing it to function more like a true real-time market.
Read more: DoubleZero mainnet goes live with 22% staking $SOL on board