What is DoubleZero founded by the former head of strategy at the Solana Foundation?

In both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) systems, while the computational power of validators continues to grow, limitations in bandwidth and the instability of communication delays between validator nodes remain key factors that hinder performance improvements.

The DoubleZero protocol seeks to break through these barriers by optimizing data flow, increasing bandwidth, and reducing latency. It aims to create a high-performance, permissionless decentralized network framework, opening up new possibilities for the future of distributed systems.

What is DoubleZero?

According to the official description, DoubleZero is not defined as an L1 or L2, but as N1 (Network 1), a decentralized framework designed to create and manage high-performance, permissionless networks. DoubleZero’s goal is to provide an infrastructure layer to accelerate communication in high-performance distributed systems, increasing bandwidth and reducing latency.

The DoubleZero protocol efficiently filters spam, increases bandwidth, reduces latency, and eliminates instability in communication by integrating fiber links contributed by individuals and organizations to build a synchronized network.

DoubleZero was founded by Austin Federa, Andrew McConnell, and Mateo Ward, with support from two core contributor teams: Firedancer and Malbec Labs. Austin Federa, the former strategic head of the Solana Foundation, resigned earlier this month to launch DoubleZero and now serves as the COO of the DoubleZero Foundation.

Andrew McConnell is the co-founder and CTO of Malbec Labs, which focuses on open-source protocol software development, hardware acceleration, and network engineering. Additionally, Nihar Shah, former Head of Data Science at Mysten Labs and former employee at Jump Crypto and Meta (Libra/Diem), joined DoubleZero as the Chief Economist.

Another key contributor team, Firedancer, was built by Jump Crypto as an independent Solana validator client. Firedancer was designed to eliminate single points of failure and enhance the overall robustness and resilience of the network. Unlike the original Rust-based validator, Firedancer is written in C, with no Rust code included, which significantly reduces the impact of potential vulnerabilities on the network and ensures Solana’s security.

According to the Lightspeed podcast, Firedancer demonstrated running at 1 million TPS during this year’s Solana Breakpoint conference, operating on top of DoubleZero.

Firedancer’s ability to boost Solana’s performance to 1 million TPS (compared to the current protocol’s limit of around 81,000 TPS) lies in its innovative architecture design and data flow optimization.

Recommended Reading: “What is Firedancer, the Highlight of Breakpoint?“

It’s worth noting that DoubleZero’s goals align closely with Solana’s overall vision. Solana’s official team and co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko have repeatedly emphasized the importance of “increasing bandwidth and reducing latency” on Twitter, which resonates with DoubleZero’s core mission.

How Does DoubleZero Work?

According to its white paper, the DoubleZero network offers two major improvements for blockchain systems: First, it filters incoming transactions in advance through dedicated hardware, eliminating spam and duplicate transactions, which effectively reduces the burden on validators. This allows the blockchain to benefit from shared system-wide filtering resources, without requiring each individual validator to provide sufficient resources. Second, DoubleZero ensures the clear routing, tracking, and prioritization of outgoing messages to enhance communication efficiency.

In terms of network architecture, DoubleZero is cleverly divided into an external ingress/egress ring and an internal data flow ring. The external ring handles external interfaces and security, while the internal ring optimizes internal communication. Specifically, the external ring connects to the public internet (the outer circle in the diagram below), where hardware such as FPGAs is used to mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, validate signatures, and filter duplicate transactions. Servers in the internal data flow ring build consensus on the filtered traffic using dedicated bandwidth lines optimized for routing.

From DoubleZero’s network architecture, we can see its key components, including network devices at the critical ingress/egress points and the bandwidth across networks. These network devices allow data links contributed by individuals and organizations to function as a prioritized network, implementing filtering, validation, and spam protection. Additionally, fiber links within the DoubleZero network provide low-latency, high-bandwidth connections between different locations. Network contributors can add their idle fiber links, either owned or leased, to the network and sign service-level agreements (SLAs) for each link, specifying endpoint locations, bandwidth, latency, and compliant MTU sizes.

Thus, DoubleZero positions itself as N1—a neutral and high-performance physical infrastructure layer. On top of this N1 layer, distributed systems and applications (such as N2 or others) can be built.

The white paper also notes that DoubleZero can be used to optimize any distributed system. L1, L2, RPC nodes, and MEV systems can all join the network to reduce validator load, mitigate DDoS attacks, and improve performance, benefiting from increased bandwidth and reduced latency. Furthermore, DoubleZero’s network architecture can be applied to online gaming, large language model training that requires high-bandwidth connections, and other distributed systems requiring low latency and high bandwidth. In DoubleZero’s vision, the protocol represents a new economic model in the bandwidth and communications sectors.

For example, on the supply side, private enterprises can contribute idle fiber links purchased or leased from telecom operators or network service providers to the DoubleZero system, which opens up new revenue streams. On the user and operator side, DoubleZero allows distributed systems to enjoy the benefits of private networks without relying on centralized systems or long-term contracts.

Overall, the DoubleZero protocol matches the needs of both suppliers and users, enabling mutual benefits by contributing and utilizing idle fiber links. It integrates individual and organizational contributions into a unified, robust, and highly scalable global network.

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