DoubleZero First Look: The Internet Layer for Solana and Beyond - Figment

DoubleZero First Look: The Internet Layer for Solana and Beyond

David Liang

Solana Ecosystem Lead

Published

May 22, 2025

As Solana pushes the boundaries of throughput and latency, it faces a persistent bottleneck: existing public internet networking infrastructure. Validator clients like Agave, Jito-Solana and Firedancer improve with each release, to Increase Bandwidth and Reduce Latency (IBRL). Increasing bandwidth refers to increasing block size limits to 100M Compute Units by the end of 2025, and reducing latency refers to building those blocks faster (sub 400ms/block). See Anza’s 2025 Mission: On the Road to 1M TPS for more details. However, the physical realities of today’s public internet infrastructure constrain Solana or any other decentralized high-performance network’s performance. Current issues with public internet for decentralized, high-performance systems like blockchains are:

• Unpredictable bandwidth
• Jitter: latency fluctuations, variance and variability of data packet arrival times.
  • Lower, consistent and predictable jitter is better
• Transaction spam overhead on compute resources

The result: the public internet’s inefficiencies impede intra-blockchain validator communication. The consequences: consensus delays, finality delays, data propagation delays, and increased costs by requiring expensive, highly-performant hardware and bandwidth infrastructure.

DoubleZero combines underutilized fiber-optic cable networking links into a synchronized network. It filters spam, increases bandwidth, lowers latency, and removes jitter from network communication. DoubleZero reduces bottlenecks and improves blockchain performance by advancing reliability and scalability. DoubleZero is a performant “underlay” for decentralized systems. DoubleZero network offers two improvements to blockchains vs existing public internet to achieve performance improvements inaccessible without centralized data centre co-location.

• Inbound transactions are filtered for data spam and duplicates using specialized Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware, prior to being propagated over DoubleZero. Blockchains benefit from shared, system-wide filtration resources instead of requiring each individual validator to provision sufficient hardware resources.
• Outbound messages are routed, tracked, and prioritized for improved efficiency. Validators control latency and reduce jitter in reaching consensus.

DoubleZero’s Architecture: Two-Ring Model

At the core of DoubleZero’s architecture is a two-ring model:

• Outer “Filter” Ring: Interfacing with the public internet, this layer receives and filters inbound traffic. Specialized, custom FPGA hardware performs real-time filtering, data packet and signature deduplication, and signature verification. This reduces inbound spam to validators, offloading filtering and signature verification tasks from validators to the DoubleZero network.

• Inner “Execution” Ring: Dedicated fiber-optic cable links operated by permissionless network contributors, who transmit filtered and validated traffic between nodes. Validators solely focus on block production, block building execution, indexing, and reverifying the smaller subset of transactions from DoubleZero’s validated, filtered data. The inner ring supports multicast and prioritized routing for efficient data transmission.

DoubleZero’s “Two-Ring” Architecture from the DoubleZero Whitepaper: Figure 1. The DoubleZero Conceptual Network Diagram

The DoubleZero’s “Two-Ring” design separates filtering and execution. Validators receive clean, deduplicated, and verified data, optimizing their compute resources for state transitions and block production. With DoubleZero, validators can now solely focus on blockbuilding execution.

DoubleZero network’s architecture connects validators, RPCs, and other systems at the network edge to a core underlay at DoubleZero Exchange points (DZXs). DZXs enable efficient connectivity between multiple data centers within a geographic area, similar to how public internet exchanges connect different networks together. These underlay links are provided by network contributors, and are the core transit layer of the protocol.

How DoubleZero’s Permissionless Physical Network Benefits All Participants

A key opportunity identified by DoubleZero is that much of the world’s physical fiber-optic cable internet infrastructure is underutilized. Enterprises and organizations over-provision for peak demand. Telecom companies have over-installed inactive and/or underused network fiber known as “ dark fiber”. DoubleZero provides a market incentive mechanism through smart contracts agreements with network contributors, to bring this bandwidth online. Participants such as Layer-1 Blockchains, RPC providers, Layer-2 Sequencers and more benefit from access to this new bandwidth capacity and data routing optimization through DoubleZero.

Network contributors lease unused or underutilized fiber, or provision new fiber connections. They register these connections on DoubleZero via smart contracts. Each contribution includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) link specifying:

• Bandwidth
• Latency targets
• Compliant Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size or the largest size of a data packet that can be transmitted over a network connection
• Endpoint location

Links are continuously monitored for SLA compliance. Incentives are aligned for cooperation instead of defection. High-performing links earn rewards. Links performing below their SLAs are penalized, made ineligible for rewards or excluded from the network. This system creates a verifiable, incentivized, and decentralized routing layer. Altogether, this increases available bandwidth and reduces latency for validators, RPCs and anyone connected to the network.

Smart Contract Defined Network

The DoubleZero protocol uses verified data stored in onchain smart contracts. This information is used to reach consensus on data routing and prioritization for the network. Contributors submit link data, SLAs, and availability. Users such as Validators, RPCs, Layer 2 sequencers etc. can opt-in to predetermined services and routes. Examples include: a specific L1’s traffic, state propagation, and validator set. Users can author their own contract to define a routing request. The smart contracts compute optimal configurations, ensuring:

• High-value traffic gets priority
• Contributors are rewarded proportionally
• Users only pay for the resources they consume

This is a significant departure and advantage over traditional telecom models, who rely on static contracts and agreements. DoubleZero enables dynamic, programmable bandwidth allocation and requests. Ultimately, DoubleZero aspires to enable tiered pricing, where users pay for priority access or base access to a given route, to maximize network efficiency.

Layer 1 Validator Benefits: Performance and Resilience

For Solana validator operators, DoubleZero offers three immediate advantages:

• Cooperative Filtration Infrastructure Sharing: Outer Ring FPGAs offloads inbound data filtration, freeing validator resources for block production, execution, propagation and consensus.
• Improved Block Propagation: Route filtered traffic (transactions, blocks, or consensus votes) over low-jitter links to the validator set. Blocks and shreds reach other validators faster, enabling higher throughput and reduced time-to-finality. High-performance validator clients or consensus algorithms can attain performance close to their theoretical maximums.
• Verifiable Transparency and Censorship Resistance: Data packets over the network are traceable. Users can verify their inclusion or exclusion from intra-validator communication (censorship). For systems sensitive to censorship, this is a beneficial feature of transparent traffic routing.

Validators access this infrastructure without centralizing and co-locating in specific data centers, or provisioning high-end hardware. Instead, they share a pooled infrastructure layer, aligning economic efficiency with decentralization.

Use Cases Beyond Layer-1 Validators: RPC, MEV, and Layer 2

RPC Nodes:

Facing public-facing traffic, RPCs deal with severe filtration, DDOS and communication surge challenges. DoubleZero ensures RPC transaction deliverability flow to leaders is fast, filtered, and resilient. It also improves RPC data delivery back to wallets, explorers, and DeFi apps.

MEV Systems:

Latency defines profitability in Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). DoubleZero enables a fairer, open, and efficient MEV ecosystem. Builders get faster access to blockchain state and submission to leaders. This gives builders more compute time to simulate and submit optimal bundles. MEV systems benefit from faster retrieval of data (read operations) and faster delivery of blocks or bundles to the current leader (write operations). Increasing bandwidth and reducing latency improve both read and write operations.

Layer 2s:

L2s can use DoubleZero to filter inbound transactions to the sequencer. They can post to or retrieve the L1s state without latency, or verify an updated state among their validator set faster. Sequencers, especially in multi-sequencer or modular architectures, need tight coordination and rapid state propagation to avoid wasted computation for the L1 and L2 validator set. DoubleZero ensures those messages move predictably and quickly.

Future Vision: A New Internet for Distributed Systems

DoubleZero is not just a Solana or blockchain scaling solution. It is a general-purpose routing and filtering network for distributed systems that need low-latency, high-bandwidth communication. Beyond blockchains, potential applications include:

• Real-time multiplayer gaming
• Federated machine learning
• Distributed LLM training
• High-performance content delivery networks

Its open, permissionless design ensures the network remains neutral infrastructure, governed and maintained by a diverse contributor base.

DoubleZero Team

DoubleZero is led by a seasoned team at the intersection of blockchain, trading infrastructure, and telecom networks.

• Austin Federa, CEO: Former Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, bringing deep ecosystem insight and protocol-level experience.
• Andrew McConnell, CTO (Malbec Labs): Previously led U.S. trading infrastructure at Jump Crypto, with a background in high-performance systems.
• Matteo Ward, Co-Founder (Malbec Labs): Former CEO of Neutrona Networks, with decades of experience in deploying and scaling fiber-optic infrastructure across the Americas.

$2Z and Figment’s Participation in the Validator Sale

Users are validator operators, who access the bandwidth provided by network contributors. Validator operators pay a “seat fee”, 5% of their validator operations revenue (inflation and block rewards, not MEV) on each DoubleZero blockchain. Seat fees are paid to network contributors, or are burned.

Token flow of the $2Z token, per “A Primer on the $2Z Token”

Similar to Solana in March of 2020, DoubleZero is running a validator auction sale of their $2Z tokens through coinlist.co. Holding some amount of $2Z is required to access and run DoubleZero’s infrastructure as a validator operator once mainnet is live.

Key Details:

• $2Z Total Supply: 10B.
• Validator Sale: Up to 1.5% of supply offered (150MM $2Z).

The validator sale was a 2-phase process, with validator operators on Solana, Sui, Aptos Celestia, Avalanche eligible to participate. Phase 1 was a formal registration and intention to buy $2Z through a custom coinlist.co DoubleZero auction. Validators register an account on coinlist and go through the KYC process to participate. Once the validator operator signed their coinlist account with the public keys of their validator, they could submit a maximum buy size and an optional per-unit $2Z valuation/max budget.

Allocations to validator operators were based on factors including:

• Signing public keys with your validators across multiple networks
• Submit the optional $2Z valuation (FDV)
• Total stake of all your public key signed validators

Next came phase 2, the price discovery phase. Submissions from all validators determined a clearing price for all participants. DoubleZero used a proprietary algorithm based on all submissions to determine this clearing price. Final Offer: eligible participants receive a customized take-it-or-leave-it offer at the same clearing price for all.

Of note were two important details for purchasers. US accredited investors normally barred from token sales could participate, and vesting schedules were vastly different depending on the where the validator operator KYC’D. For US Purchasers: 1-year cliff from purchase date. Non-US Purchasers: the longer of (i) mainnet or (ii) 40-days from purchase date.

Flow diagram of the $2Z token validator sale process per coinlist.co auction page

Figment participated in the sale as we firmly believe DoubleZero’s “Internet Layer” will improve transaction throughput, reduce latency and jitter between geographically distributed validators, and improve validator performance in Solana and other high-performance L1 blockchains. Figment plans to support DoubleZero on testnet and mainnet, please reach out to us if you have any questions.

Conclusion

Per Max Resnick, lead economist at Anza: execution is not the bottleneck, networking is the bottleneck for Solana. DoubleZero addresses the networking bottleneck with a new, decentralized, physical infrastructure layer. DoubleZero is built for high-performance scale and bandwidth. They offload transaction filtering from validators, so validators can solely focus on execution and blockbuilding. IBRL mode derisks using the DoubleZero network, as validators can fallback to their existing public internet infrastructure. DoubleZero intelligently routes traffic, reclaims idle fibre bandwidth, incentivizes laying new fibre and fibre contribution for their network. These features enable blockchains to operate at the theoretical limits of what their consensus mechanisms and validator clients allow.

The result? A faster, fairer, and more resilient network for everyone participating in the next generation of decentralized applications. Put simply, DoubleZero is The Internet Layer for Blockchains.