Austin Federa departs from Solana Foundation to start new protocol
Solana Foundation Strategy Lead Austin Federa has left the project to co-found a new protocol and network geared toward managing high-performance, permissionless networks.
In a Dec. 4 statement on X, Federa said leaving Solana after four years was one of the “hardest professional decisions I’ve had to make” but says his new role will let him still be involved in the network “from the other side.”
According to Federa, his new project, DoubleZero, isn’t a layer 1 or layer 2 protocol but something else entirely, an N1, new global base layer network optimized for blockchain that hopes to increase bandwidth and reduce latency.
Source: Austin Federa
“We’re building a network architecture capable of supporting tens of millions of transactions per second,” he said.
“We’re starting with Solana, but DoubleZero is neutral base layer infrastructure – and N1 – and a foundation for all high-performance blockchains.”
Federa says DoubleZero will operate as a permissionless high-performance network of dedicated fiber and subsea cables comprised of independent contributors.
The network hopes to offer filtration and verification services conducted by network devices running open-source code. Source: DoubleZero white paper
The project white paper, released Dec. 2, promises two main improvements to blockchains as part of its design. Outbound messages can be routed, tracked, and prioritized to improve efficiency.
Inbound transactions can also be filtered out of spam and duplicates by specialized hardware before being sent over the DoubleZero network through a shared system-wide filtration instead of the task falling to individual validators.
The network also has verification services, conducted by network devices running open source code, to perform signature verification on inbound data.
According to the white paper, this will allow systems like layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains to be free of communication bottlenecks and approach maximum performance.
DoubleZero will have a decentralized network that hopes to solve communication bottlenecks in systems like layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains. Source: DoubleZero white paper
Federa says the aim is to “solve a problem at the heart of the internet, and at the heart of high-performance blockchain: global, base layer connectivity.”
“The goal is simple: increase bandwidth and reduce latency while increasing decentralization and censorship resistance to unlock today’s high-performance blockchains and enable entirely new types of network architectures to be built,” Federa added.
Aside from the benefits to blockchain projects, the white paper speculates any distributed systems that have to communicate quickly and precisely will benefit.
Related: Solana network ‘nowhere near where we expect it to be’ — Solana Foundation exec
Specifically, online gaming where “mild lags ruin the user experience” and relies on peer-to-peer models or central servers.
Training large language models was also suggested as a possible use case, with the DoubleZero network acting as the high-bandwidth connection between data centers.
DoubleZero was founded by Austin Federa and crypto entrepreneurs Andrew McConnell and Mateo Ward. It’s launching with two core contributor teams, Firedancer and Malbec Labs.
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