Solana Foundation’s Strategy Lead Departs for a New High-Throughput Network

Austin Federa, Solana’s strategy lead, announced on his X page that he is stepping down to co-found a new project called DoubleZero. According to Federa, the initiative aims to tackle challenges at “the heart of the internet and high-performance blockchains.”

The decision raised eyebrows, as Federa is leaving Solana—a high-throughput blockchain—for another network with similar ambitions. However, he described the move as the toughest professional decision he has ever made.

DoubleZero is garnering significant interest due to its unique approach. According to its whitepaper, the project isn’t building a traditional Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain. Instead, it is creating a new type of network designed to work alongside existing blockchains and even broader internet infrastructure.

The core premise of DoubleZero lies in addressing bottlenecks in current blockchain infrastructure. As the whitepaper highlights, most blockchains today still rely on outdated physical network layers, a structure that hasn’t evolved much since Bitcoin’s inception. This lack of development constrains scalability and decentralization, leading to inefficiencies and centralization in high-performance blockchains.

The DoubleZero team explained:

“…these systems are increasingly bottlenecked by bandwidth limitations and variable latency in communication between validators, rather than compute capabilities within validators.”

To address these issues, DoubleZero aims to build a novel infrastructure layer that overcomes the limitations of current blockchain networks.

One of DoubleZero’s key innovations involves rethinking how validators function in proof-of-stake (PoS) networks. In traditional blockchains, validators handle multiple responsibilities: filtering and verifying transactions, producing blocks, and executing transactions. This workload strains performance and scalability.

DoubleZero proposes offloading some of these tasks to a dedicated filtering network. This filtering layer will process inbound transactions before they reach the validators, performing tasks such as spam removal, transaction deduplication, and signature verification.

Unlike validators, which juggle multiple roles, these filtering nodes will focus solely on transaction preprocessing. This specialization allows them to handle significantly more traffic. Validators, in turn, will receive a smaller, pre-verified set of transactions, reducing their workload while maintaining security.

DoubleZero’s infrastructure plans extend beyond traditional blockchain frameworks. The network will rely on high-performance fiber links, either directly owned by contributors or leased from major providers, to reduce reliance on public internet infrastructure.

This design not only supports DoubleZero’s blockchain but also offers services to optimize other distributed systems. Potential applications include blockchain networks, content delivery systems, gaming platforms, large language models, and enterprise-grade solutions.

So far, the exact timeline for DoubleZero’s mainnet launch remains unknown. However, it is undoubtedly set to be one of the most highly anticipated launches of the coming year.