According to Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero—a project focused on developing high-speed fiber optic communication rails for blockchains—the public internet infrastructure is the primary speed and performance bottleneck for high-throughput blockchain networks. “The drawback of the public internet is that it was never designed for high-performance systems. It was built around a model where one large server communicates with one smaller server, ” Federa explained during an interview with Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025.

He elaborated: “Our validators are distributed globally, with rotating leader schedules constantly changing. They shift roles from being massive consumers of data to extremely large broadcasters of data, which requires substantial resources both for data ingress and egress. ” Federa added that today's blockchain performance limits are no longer due to computing power or software, but rather the constraints of public internet infrastructure. Networks like DoubleZero aim to accelerate blockchain speeds, narrow spreads in decentralized finance (DeFi) trades, reduce transaction fees, and enable new blockchain use cases that were previously unattainable due to limitations in communication infrastructure. Related: Blockchains ready for institutions, lawyers hesitate: DoubleZero CEO DoubleZero, co-founded by Austin Federa in 2024 Austin Federa departed from the Solana Foundation to launch the DoubleZero Protocol in December 2024, with the mission of lowering latency—the time data takes to travel across networks—and increasing bandwidth, the volume of data a network can handle simultaneously. In April 2025, DoubleZero held a validator token sale, offering token purchase agreements to node operators interested in becoming validators on the network. Participation was limited to accredited investors and active validators on high-throughput blockchain networks such as Solana, Celestia, Sui, Aptos, and Avalanche. Following a successful $28 million capital raise, DoubleZero plans to launch its public mainnet in the second half of 2025. Federa told Cointelegraph that the growing throughput demands of blockchain networks and the overall industry’s development require the construction of specialized, high-performance communication infrastructure to support increasingly sophisticated projects.