A former Solana exec is taking a page out of Wall Street playbook to make global crypto trades faster

• DoubleZero, a 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 making it faster in the process.
• On Mar. 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, redirecting 2.4 million SOL from its 13 million SOL pool to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
• The goal is simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic concentration in Europe and spread globally.

DoubleZero, a 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 making it faster in the process.

On Mar. 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, redirecting 2.4 million SOL from its 13 million pool to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each region will receive up to 600,000 SOL in additional delegated stake incentives.

DoubleZero runs a dedicated high-speed internet network that helps Solana’s computers talk to each other faster and more reliably. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation.

DoubleZero's goal in rolling out the incentive is simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic concentration in Europe and introduce "multicast functionality," a data distribution method widely used in traditional finance.

Geographic cluster

One of the main goals of Federa is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.

“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains getting faster is there’s more incentive to co-locate next to one another,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to early high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when firms scrambled to place servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds off trades.

Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: A Q&A With Austin Federa on DoubleZero

Today, much of Solana’s staked tokens, which secure the network, sit in Central Europe — largely for historical and economic reasons. “There were a lot of really good, really cheap bare-metal data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized for that kind of hosting early on, and the infrastructure just built up there.”

But geographic clustering creates trade-offs: If most validators are in Europe, users farther away may be at a disadvantage.

“If I’m sitting in South America trying to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who’s got a computer in Germany might actually win that trade.”

To address that imbalance, DoubleZero is offering 2.4 million SOL and aims to make it economically viable for validators to operate outside traditional hubs.

'More dependable'

The next problem DoubleZero is trying to solve through the new initiative is data transmission latency.

The main barrier to expanding into those areas isn’t technical, Federa said — it’s economic. “Because you’re further away, everything takes longer to get there. It’s like Amazon Prime — in New York you get it same day. In Montana, it’s four or five days.”

DoubleZero says its private fiber network helps address connectivity issues, while the new delegation incentives aim to offset the economic penalty of being outside traditional hubs.

This is why, alongside the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing the multicast functionality to Solana.

Federa compared it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of people can be watching that radio wave… and it’s no additional tax.” Streaming, by contrast, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.

Blockchain networks today largely operate like streaming services — sending duplicate data over and over. Multicast, he said, changes that.

“In a pre-multicast world, if I’m sending data to 1,000 nodes, I’m handing out 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send one copy, and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”

That reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in how quickly participants receive data, and creates more room for future upgrades. It also makes blockchain infrastructure behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicast.

“Traditional finance isn’t just faster than blockchain — it’s more dependable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to blockchain networking, it makes it a much more attractive place for market makers and traders.”

Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that financial incentives like this will help Solana’s infrastructure spread globally, moving it closer to functioning like a truly real-time market.

Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet Goes Live With 22% of Staked SOL on Board

• Grayscale’s Zach Pandl said AI and blockchains are fundamentally complementary, even as crypto has sold off alongside software stocks amid AI-driven market volatility.
• Pandl argued blockchains could become the financial rails for AI agents, enabling wallet-based, 24/7 global transactions.
• He also said blockchains may help address AI risks such as deepfakes and centralized control.

Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.