Austin Federa departs from the Solana Foundation to launch a new protocol.
Austin Federa, chief strategy officer at the Solana Foundation, released the project to establish a new protocol and network dedicated to managing high-performance permissionless networks.
In a Dec. 4 statement on X, Federa said that leaving Solana after four years was “one of the hardest career decisions I've ever had to make,” but that the new role would still allow him to be involved with the network. He said.
According to Federa, its new project DoubleZero is not a Layer 1 or Layer 2 protocol, but a fully N1, new global base layer network optimized for blockchain to increase bandwidth and reduce latency.
“We're building a network architecture that can support tens of millions of transactions per second,” he said.
“We're starting with Solana, but DoubleZero is the independent base layer infrastructure — and N1 — and the foundation for all high-performance blockchains.”
Federa said DoubleZero operates fiber and submarine cables as a license-free high-performance network of independent contributors.
The project's white paper, released on December 2, promises two major improvements to blockchains as part of its design. Outbound messages can be forwarded, tracked and prioritized to improve efficiency.
Incoming transactions can be filtered from spam and duplicates by specialized hardware before being sent through a common system-wide filter on the DoubleZero network, rather than falling to individual validators.
The network also has authentication services, driven by network tools running open source code, to perform signature verification on incoming data.
According to the white paper, this allows systems like Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains to be free of communication bottlenecks and have high performance.
Federa says its goal 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 to unlock today's high-performance blockchains and enable the construction of entirely new types of network architectures that are decentralized and censorship-resistant,” Federa added.
In addition to the benefits of blockchain projects, the white paper envisions any distributed systems that need to be connected quickly and effectively.
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Especially online gaming where “mild delays can ruin the user experience” and rely on peer-to-peer models or centralized servers.
A double zero network is proposed as an alternative use case for training large linguistic models as a high-bandwidth connection between data centers.
DoubleZero was founded by Austin Federa and crypto entrepreneurs Andrew McConnell and Matthew Ward. It's getting started with two main contributing teams, Firedancer and Malbec Labs.
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