DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is rolling out a major update aimed at distributing the Solana network more evenly around the world and increasing the speed of the process.
On March 9, the company will launch “Phase 2” of the DoubleZero delegation program, reallocating 2.4 million SOL from a 13 million pool to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as Sao Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each region will receive an additional delegated equity incentive of up to 600,000 SOL.
DoubleZero runs a private high-speed Internet that helps Solana’s computers communicate with each other faster and more reliably. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million at a valuation of $400 million.
DoubleZero’s goals for launching incentives are simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic concentration in Europe and introduce “multicast capabilities,” a data distribution method widely used in traditional finance.
geographical clusters
One of Federa’s main goals is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.
“One of the unintended consequences of blockchain getting faster is that people are more motivated to be near each other,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to Wall Street’s early days of high-frequency trading wars, when firms scrambled to place servers closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shorten trading times.
Read more: “The Flash Boys of Cryptocurrency”: Austin Federa’s Q&A on DoubleZero
Today, the majority of Solana’s staked tokens are located in Central Europe, primarily for historical and economic reasons. “There are a lot of very good, very cheap bare metal data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized for this type of hosting very early on, and the infrastructure was just being set up.”
But geographical clustering creates trade-offs: if most validators are in Europe, users who are further away may be at a disadvantage.
“If I’m in South America trying to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone with a computer in Germany might actually win the deal.”
To address this imbalance, DoubleZero has provided 2.4 million SOL, aiming to make it economically feasible for validators to operate outside of traditional centers.
“More reliable”
The next issue DoubleZero is trying to solve with its new initiative is data transfer latency.
Fedela said the main barrier to expansion into these areas is not technology but economics. “Everything takes longer to arrive because of the distance. It’s like Amazon Prime — in New York, you get it the same day. In Montana, it takes four or five days.”
DoubleZero said its dedicated fiber network helps solve connectivity issues, while new licensing incentives are designed to offset financial losses outside traditional centers.
That’s why, in addition to geo-boosting, DoubleZero is also introducing multicast capabilities to Solana.
Federa compares it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus watching it via streaming. With satellite, “an unlimited number of people can watch the airwaves…without paying additional taxes.” Streaming, by contrast, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Today’s blockchain networks are largely similar to streaming services – sending duplicate data over and over again. Multicast changes that, he said.
“In the pre-multicast world, if I sent data to 1,000 nodes, I distributed 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send a copy and the network hardware copies it closer to where it needs to go.”
This reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in the speed at which participants receive data, and creates more room for future upgrades. It also enables blockchain infrastructure to behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicast.
“Traditional finance is not only faster than blockchain, it’s also more reliable,” Fedela said. “If we can bring more certainty to a blockchain network, it will become a more attractive place for market makers and traders.”
Ultimately, DoubleZero believes that such financial incentives will help Solana’s infrastructure spread globally, bringing it closer to the operation of a true real-time market.
Learn more: DoubleZero mainnet is online, 22% of SOL is online