Why Solana’s Former Head of Strategy Is Building a New Internet at DoubleZero

For as much building there is in crypto, what good is it all if it runs on the same slow internet? 

That’s the problem Austin Federa left his role as Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation to solve.

“The public internet isn’t really fast enough for the level of optimization we’ve gotten to with validator clients nowadays,” Federa tells Coinage. “This isn’t just true of Solana, but Firedancer was the first project that really made this clear… you can do a million transactions per second in a test cluster, but can you do that in production? What you’d find is the public internet was the main bottleneck holding these systems back.”

That realization led Federa to co-found DoubleZero, a new “physical fiber infrastructure network” designed to build a faster, more predictable internet optimized for blockchain. “We’re effectively building a new internet optimized for blockchain and other types of high-performance distributed systems,” he said. “Nasdaq, Google’s private fiber network, Amazon’s private fiber network — every trading firm in the world uses all this technology. It’s just not available on the public internet.”

In a world where blockchains are competing with traditional markets for speed and reliability, Federa believes the next frontier isn’t in new consensus algorithms or faster hardware — it’s in fixing the pipes themselves. “What makes a good trading environment isn’t speed, it’s predictability,” he explained. “The challenge with decentralized systems is that they run over the public internet, and the public internet is very unpredictable.”

To illustrate the point, Federa compared it to something most people understand all too well. “You can take an Uber from JFK to Midtown and it can be 45 minutes or two hours and 45 minutes,” he said. “That kind of nondeterminism exists in decentralized systems today. Market makers have to account for that variance when they’re quoting a price because they don’t know how long it’ll take that price to get into the system.”

That lack of predictability doesn’t just make decentralized finance less competitive — it exposes the irony that much of today’s “internet” is already private. “Even for something as simple as buffering video, the public internet isn’t great,” Federa said. “Netflix caches all of its popular content locally. Meta is the world’s largest investor in subsea fiber. They want your Instagram Reels to load really quickly so they can sell you more ads. If even something like loading Instagram Reels is too much for the public internet, why are we trying to build decentralized finance that can compete with traditional finance?”

DoubleZero’s approach builds on the same tools used by big tech and Wall Street — but without the same centralization. “We’re creating a new network capable of handling the volume of transactions and throughput blockchain really needs to compete with centralized systems,” Federa said. “We have 11 independent contributors providing fiber at this point, which may not sound like much, but there are only about 15 tier-one ISPs in the world. So we’re almost at the same level of contribution as the public internet.”

The project recently gained attention for another reason: DoubleZero received a rare no-action letter from the SEC, clearing its token distribution structure from being treated as a securities transaction. “We were really thrilled to get that no-action letter,” Federa said. “For many projects, that would be an important thing to hang your hat on and say, ‘look, the SEC does not consider this a security.’ For us, it really unlocks a huge amount of potential network contributors.”

That regulatory clarity, Federa explained, makes it possible for large telecommunications firms to participate. “You go to a telco owned by a PE firm and say, ‘we’re going to reward you in tokens, and by the way, they may be unregistered securities’—that’s a problem,” he said. “The no-action letter covers the distribution of payments to network contributors, and those are not securities transactions according to the SEC.”

It’s a critical step forward for a founder who’s seen the crypto cycle from every angle — through Solana’s meteoric rise, the FTX collapse, and now a renewed push for infrastructure that can actually support global-scale blockchains. “Projects that have legitimate fundamentals behind them weather cycles very well,” he reflected. “Projects that don’t, do not. The exception is they need incredible financial engineering to continue propping them up.”

Now, Federa says DoubleZero’s focus is on building something that can last. “We don’t think the current internet is fixable for the needs of blockchain in the time horizon we have,” he said. “The public internet gets better every year, but not at the pace we need it to. So we’re going to create a parallel infrastructure for this — just like the traditional technology companies and the TradFi companies created parallel networks for their operations.”

In a way, the project mirrors what crypto itself has always been about: designing an alternative system that works better than the one we have. And for Federa, who once worked as a journalist before entering the crypto world, the mission is as much philosophical as it is technical. “We either believe we are sovereign individuals and that crypto is here to move us toward more accountability and responsibility — or we don’t,” he said. “And if you don’t, that’s fine. But let’s be honest about what we’re asking for here.”

As for what’s next, Federa doesn’t mince words. “We have a year until the midterms,” he warned. “If we don’t get market structure through Congress in the next 12 months, we will have blown a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

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