Austin Federa: From Solana Foundation to Double Zero's Fiber Revolution

**Austin Federa** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**Alex Golding** (0:06)
Hey guys, Solana and other high-throughput chains are hitting internet limits, not software limits. And for that reason, I'm here today with Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero, about building a permissionless, high-performance fiber pipeline, starting with the Solana network and its validator set as an initial target market. We're going to dig into how it works, what changes for operators, and how to keep it fair. I do need to disclose, Delphi is an investor in DoubleZero, and nothing here is investment advice. I also need to disclose that I'm super bullish about Austin and this project, and for months I tried to gain access to it, and even wrote him a message from my hospital bed, being like, Austin, I just can't stop thinking about your company. We have to somehow work together on this. So with that all said, I'd love to turn over to Austin so he can do a brief introduction, and we can kind of take it away from there.

**Austin Federa** (0:59)
See, now I think you're interested in the project with just the pain meds. Hey, thanks for having me here today.

**Alex Golding** (1:08)
Of course. So as you guys know, I'm Alex Golding. I'm a VC here at Delphi Ventures. Before that, I worked at Solana Labs briefly in the summer of 2021 on our business development and venture capital teams. And while I was there, I met Austin. And I got to know Austin, I got to experience his work ethic, his personal, I got to watch the way he comported himself, the way he did business, the way he interact with others. And now we get to come along for the ride with DoubleZero. As I mentioned, they're working on a problem that's solving something that affects the entire Internet. And I'd love if maybe he could introduce himself, give us a brief background of what brought him here, what inspired him and yeah, we can take it away from him.

**Austin Federa** (1:53)
So I'm one of the three co-founders of DoubleZero and we really are building a parallel Internet for high performance distributed systems. And effectively what this is, is we've been limited in not just crypto, but mostly crypto for a number of years by the fact that everything relies on the public Internet. And that may seem a little bit like an oxymoron because you look at these companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. You think, oh, these are all giant public Internet companies. It's like, how is the public Internet holding back these organizations? And the answer is it's not because they've built entirely parallel networks. We think about these as public Internet companies, but Meta is the largest investor in undersea fiber of any company in the world right now. And they do this not out of the goodness of their heart because they want to make the Internet a better place. They do this because they want to sell you ads, and they want Instagram reels to load really quickly when you're in Malaysia, and they want to be able to have video calls between people who are in different parts of the world. They want to basically stick you into their ecosystem so they can sell you ads. Most of these companies are ad deck companies at the end of the day. And in order to do that, the public Internet is too slow for them. They've built this whole parallel infrastructure. But private networking is an anti-network effect business. If I build a private network for my company, your company can't use it. And this is kind of how it's always been built. The first folks to really build private networks were, well, after the universities would build the public Internet to begin with, were financial companies that are going out and trying to build systems like high frequency trading systems. But we've never had a private network, a dedicated high performance network that was operated by multiple independent parties. And if you think about it from a crypto perspective, no one's going to trust a network run by one company. It needs to be run by a bunch of different companies and a bunch of different individuals. And so that's really what we set out to build with DoubleZero, is a high performance network that can have the same performance characteristics as Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and all these big tech companies use, as well as the high frequency trading firms like Citadel and Jump and DRW, but is owned and managed by multiple independent entities and is therefore suitable for blockchains and allowing them to reach their true potential.