DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is launching a major update aimed at spreading the Solana network more evenly around the world and making it faster in the process.
On March 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, redirecting 2.4 million SOL from its pool of 13 million 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 participation incentives.
DoubleZero runs a dedicated high-speed Internet network that helps Solana 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 goal in implementing 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 Federa’s main objectives is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.
“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains becoming faster is that there is more incentive to co-locate,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to the first high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when companies rushed to place servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds off transactions.
Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: Q&A with Austin Federa on DoubleZero
Today, much of Solana’s staked tokens, which secure the network, are located in Central Europe, largely for historical and economic reasons. “There were a lot of really good, really cheap core data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized for that type of accommodation from the beginning and the infrastructure was just built there.”
But geographical clustering creates trade-offs: if most validators are in Europe, users further away may be at a disadvantage.
“If I’m sitting in South America trying to run an operation on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who has a computer in Germany could 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 of traditional hubs.
“More reliable”
The next problem that DoubleZero is trying to solve through the new initiative is data transmission latency.
The main barrier to expanding into those areas is not technical, Federa said, but economic. “Because you’re further away, everything takes longer to arrive. It’s like Amazon Prime: In New York you get it the same day. In Montana, it’s four or five days.”
DoubleZero says its private fiber network helps address connectivity issues, while new incentives for delegation aim to offset the economic penalty of being outside traditional hubs.
That’s why, along with the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing 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 there’s no additional tax.” Streaming, on the other hand, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.
Today, Blockchain networks largely function as streaming services: they send duplicate data over and over again. Multicasting, he said, changes that.
“In a pre-multicast world, if I send data to 1,000 nodes, I deliver 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send a copy and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”
This reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in how quickly participants receive data, and creates more room for future updates. It also makes blockchain infrastructure behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicasting.
“Traditional finance is not only faster than blockchain: it is more reliable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to the blockchain network, it will make 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, bringing it closer to functioning as a truly real-time marketplace.
Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet goes live with 22% SOL staked on board
