DoubleZero, the crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is taking a page from Wall Street to make Solana faster and fairer across the globe. On March 9 the company will launch “Phase II” of its Delegation Program, shifting 2.4 million SOL from its 13 million SOL stake pool to boost validators in underrepresented regions — São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Each region can receive up to 600,000 SOL in additional delegated stake incentives.
DoubleZero operates a private, high-speed fiber network designed to reduce latency between Solana validators. The company, which raised $28 million in 2025 at a $400 million valuation, says the new delegation incentives are aimed at two linked problems: the geographic concentration of Solana validators in Europe and inefficient data distribution that disadvantages distant nodes.
“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains getting faster is there’s more incentive to co-locate next to one another,” Federa told reporters, likening the rush to colocate servers to the high-frequency trading arms race on Wall Street, when firms placed hardware closer to exchanges to shave milliseconds off trades. Today, much of Solana’s staked SOL — the tokens that secure the network — is concentrated in Central Europe, a result of early optimizations for cheap, robust data centers there. But that clustering creates trade-offs: users and validators farther from Europe can be slower to receive market data.
Federa illustrated the problem simply: “If I’m sitting in South America trying to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first. But someone who’s got a computer in Germany might actually win that trade.” DoubleZero’s 2.4 million SOL allocation is intended to make running validators outside legacy hubs economically viable, reducing that geographic disadvantage.
On the connectivity front, DoubleZero is introducing multicast functionality to Solana — a technique long used by traditional exchanges to distribute market data. Federa compared multicast to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming: satellite broadcasts let an effectively infinite number of viewers consume the same signal with no extra copies, while streaming requires a separate data stream for each viewer. “In a pre-multicast world, if I’m sending data to 1,000 nodes, I’m handing out 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send one copy, and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”
Multicast can lower bandwidth costs, reduce disparities in how quickly participants receive data, and free up capacity for future upgrades — bringing blockchain networking closer to the determinism and reliability incumbent exchanges offer. That, Federa argues, makes Solana a more attractive venue for market makers and high-speed traders who demand consistency as much as speed.
DoubleZero frames its dual approach — financial incentives to diversify validator geography plus private-fiber and multicast tech to reduce latency — as a push to make Solana behave more like a real-time market infrastructure, rather than a scattered, regional network. If it succeeds, the changes could rebalance where validators run and narrow the timing advantages held by colocated operators in Europe, fostering a fairer, more globally distributed ecosystem.
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