Austin Federa, who left his role as head of strategy at the Solana Foundation in 2024, has spent the last 18 months building a response to a problem he sees as a core unfairness in crypto markets: physical proximity to exchange infrastructure gives some traders a consistent edge. His startup, DoubleZero, now says it has a practical fix ready.
The issue is simple but often misunderstood. DeFi touts decentralization—open-source code, permissionless validators—but when trades are decided in milliseconds, the physics of distance win out. Validators and matching engines tend to cluster in the same data centers, giving nearby traders a speed advantage. Federa points to platforms such as Hyperliquid, where Tokyo-based participants can enjoy roughly a 200-millisecond head start over traders further away. “It may be decentralized from a governance perspective, but it’s not truly distributed,” he says.
Wall Street has already wrestled with this problem. When the NYSE built its Mahwah, New Jersey data center, it engineered cable-length equalization to eliminate asymmetric access down to nanoseconds—less a regulatory requirement than a business necessity. Exchanges that allowed systemic latency advantages would lose order flow to fairer venues.
DoubleZero’s approach borrows that Wall Street playbook and adapts it for crypto. Instead of relying on the public internet, the company aggregates private fiber from network operators and routes blockchain traffic over dedicated links. Crucially, it timestamps orders at multiple global entry points and reconstructs an auditable, fair sequence of events—functionally analogous to cable equalization—so venues can show trades were ordered and executed in a provable way.
That verifiability is key. On the open internet, a trader whose order arrives late can’t easily distinguish ordinary congestion from manipulation—did packets drop, or did someone see the transaction and intentionally delay it? DoubleZero argues a managed network with deterministic latency removes that ambiguity. Physics still applies—someone geographically closer will often be faster—but predictable, lower variance latency reduces the advantage and makes outcomes more contestable.
The implications go beyond speed. High-frequency firms in traditional markets pay for predictable latency, not just absolute low latency. If DeFi venues can offer deterministic performance and auditable timestamps, they could attract liquidity by marketing fairness as a product feature. Federa’s point: market fairness in traditional finance evolved because exchanges made it a commercial priority, not only because regulators demanded it. DeFi may need the same market pressure—venues willing to pay for equitable access—before distributed infrastructure becomes a priority.
Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that crypto’s next frontier isn’t just proving decentralized systems work, but building truly distributed ones where server location doesn’t determine winners. As Federa puts it, “No one wants to trade on an unfair platform.” Whether major venues decide that fairness is worth the investment will determine how fast that future arrives.
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