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- [00:00]
Host
Foreign. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, gather back around the radio or the, the ipod, wherever you guys are in the world. Man, I am so excited to have. You guys are in the right place because we are joined by the co founder of Double Zero, Austin Federa. We're not joined by Brendan, my co host today, as you guys, as you guys know and love him. He's out of the office, so you guys are stuck with me. But Austin and I are gonna have an awesome conversation. And yeah, Austin, I, I couldn't be more excited to have you. How are you doing today?
- [00:41]
Austin Federa
Good, good. Thanks for having me back on.
- [00:43]
Host
Yeah, no, last time we spoke, you were, you were repping the Solana Foundation. You were the former head of strategy over there and been there for years. I think we, you know, talked to you a couple times and you were kind of the go to guy when we were learning about, you know, where was that whole ecosystem going? How is it going to be growing? And you were spot on because you were, you know, you were really pounding the pavement early on and. But you've since left and you've started your own thing, as they say. You've started your own thing. So I want to know about Double Zero. You're the co founder of IT. People, you know, have probably heard your past and your history and some of the other episodes. So let's kind of just, you know, know, jump in to Double Zero and what kind of what it's about and what made you start it.
- [01:27]
Austin Federa
Yeah, certainly. So Double Zero is set out to sort of solve what I think we'd call like a fundamental problem facing blockchain today. But it's not a problem most people are aware of. So at its core, what we're doing at Double Zero is building a new Internet. But that doesn't mean exactly what you think it means. So most people, when you say, oh, we're building a new Internet, they're like, oh, you're going to like rebuild Facebook and Google. And it's like, no, no, no. We're talking about the physical cables that the Internet runs on. So today the public Internet, which we all know and love and is an incredible product and resource, runs primarily on fiber cables that run around the world. There's hundreds of these that run underwater across continents and across oceans. There's tens of thousands of terrestrial fiber cables, probably hundreds of thousands all over the world as well. And this is what carries the Internet today. But this system is built on 40 years of basically cobbled together different types of systems. And this is why if you look at the traditional financial space, they don't really use the public Internet that much at all. If you look at a high frequency trading shop, they're pretty much never touching the public Internet. Everything they do, from market data to trade data to executions to all this type of stuff runs over private dedicated lines. If you ever read Flashboys, this is exactly what that transformation was about. About saying, look, if you can be smart or you can be fast, you should pick fast. Because sometimes you're wrong if you're smart, but you're never wrong if you're fast. And this is basically the whole theory that's like all these HFT firms have been operating on for years at this point. At the same time, most large public companies and large technology companies have started to invest pretty heavily in fiber and physical infrastructure. So this started with Facebook, goes from a dorm room company to a large publicly traded company. But even in that sort of run up into profitability, in the early days, pre IPO and even after ipo, they weren't really running their own physical infrastructure. But at some point Facebook decides, look, our biggest barrier to growth is two things. One, we need more data center space. And two, the Internet's pretty slow, especially in our growth markets and new markets that we're trying to go into. And so even a company like Facebook says, we're going to start building our own data centers and we're going to start running our own fiber. They wired up the Philippines. Most of the fiber cables in the Philippines are run or financed by Facebook. And that was entirely so they could sell ads to people. Like every large Web2 company or even Web1 company is, eventually reaches the, the size where it starts thinking seriously about the physical infrastructure that its software business operates on. And crypto never really had that moment, right. Crypto's gone from, you know, what, 15, 16 years ago, Bitcoin launching and sort of starting to slowly change the world to fast networks like Solana, to Mega Eth, to Monad, to Sui, to Aptos, to all this new stuff coming. It's all still running over the public Internet and it's still, still competing with all of the other web traffic that you see today. And the goal of the Double Zero project is basically to accelerate the entire space by about a decade by throwing more connectivity at it than anyone has previously thought possible and doing so with a whole bunch of new technologies that are simply not available on the public Internet today.
- [04:58]
Host
Wow. What are those technologies that are not available to the average Joe?
- [05:04]
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- [08:05]
Austin Federa
Yeah, so there's little things that sound like little things like multicast is a really great example of this. So multicast. Most people encounter multicast actually in their home, but they don't really realize it. So if you are using Airplay speakers or Chromecast speakers or Sonos or something like that, where you're sending music from one location, your phone to multiple speakers, you're using a technology called multicast. And what that does is it basically allows your phone to send or your laptop to send out one packet and then the network automatically replicates those packets and sends them to all the places they have to go. It is basically hardware accelerated packet distribution. And this, you know, seems like, oh, this is a great idea. Like, like why isn't everything brought on this?
- [08:51]
Host
Well, I thought it was all Bluetooth.
- [08:53]
Austin Federa
Yeah, right. No, no, no, it's all, it's all running over your local area network in your house. This is why, if you remember back in like the old days when you bough Sonos system, you had to buy this weird router from them too. The Sonos link bridge or whatever it was called. This was because home grade routers at the time didn't support multicast, but now pretty much everything does today. And this is really efficient because if your phone had to pull in seven copies of the song first off, that's suddenly seven times as much bandwidth. And then it has to send all those seven copies out to each of these speakers. Well, that's also a huge amount of replicated bandwidth and your phone would just kind of overheat and you know, it would suck up the battery much more quickly. So you might ask like, why don't we do this in the public Internet. Everyone wants to stream the super bowl at the same time. And if you're based in the United States, the experience of streaming the super bowl is not very good. Right. It took probably 10 years for companies to figure out how we actually stream big sports events. Because multicast doesn't exist on the public Internet. You can't simply broadcast out something like the super bowl feed and say, well, anyone who wants to tap into it can tap into it. This is part of what made radio and original broadcast television, even satellite television and even cable television so easy is you're just sending out one copy of the signal and anyone who wants to can tune into it. Because the Internet, I have no idea.
- [10:14]
Host
It didn't even work like that.
- [10:16]
Austin Federa
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So like if you're tuning into like FM radio, like back in the old days, right, there's just a big, big antenna sending out a signal and you're just tuning into that signal. The same way you can, you know, tune your radio and you can pick up signals from satellites or air traffic control or whatever. Any sort of broadcast that's unencrypted, it's not an opt in service. Like they don't have to say yes, you can listen to it, you just tune your dial to it. If I want to receive packets from YouTube, my computer has to go request them and then YouTube has to send them to me. And so if there's a million people in the world trying to watch the same video, there's a million copies of that video flying over the public Internet at any given moment.
- [10:56]
Host
And so you're changing that.
- [10:57]
Austin Federa
Yeah. And so, yeah. So long story short, what's really cool about Multicast is it allows the server to send the packet once and the network gets it where it needs to go. And this is not how things exist today, right? Today if you're a Solana validator or a Sui validator or an Ethereum validator, you are sending out copies of your block that you've built to every single other node in the network. And there's trees and multiplication. So on Solana you send it to 200. On Ethereum you send it to a bunch of your neighbors, they send it to a bunch of other people. But it's this very inefficient system. It's very censorship resistant, which is really nice, right? Especially in the early days. Like it's a BitTorrent. BitTorrent is an incredibly censorship resistant protocol, but it's very slow. And so to actually get the state all the changes that have occurred from the block I've built and the execution data associated with that to the rest of the network actually takes a lot of time. Only about 2% of an Ethereum block is actually executing the block. The rest of it is just basically waiting for the data to move around to all the validators in the world. Even on Solana, where block times are only 400 milliseconds, validators spend a huge amount of time and a huge amount of bandwidth sending copies of their data out everywhere else in the world. And it works pretty well on Solana, right? There's. There's 1400 validators and another thousand RPC servers. On Solana, It's. It's the network with the highest number of validators for how fast it is. But if we really look forward into the future and say, well, blockchains need to be doing a million transactions per second, that type of packet multiplication math that's necessary if every validator has to send all of their packets all the time to all these locations gets us into places where the amount of bandwidth required is basically untenable. And the amount of time it takes to distribute all these packets and everything is meaningfully slowing down these networks. And so one of the other things that Double Zero does is it brings really dependable connections to all these validators. So running over the public Internet today, it can feel like everything's super fast and super responsive. But we all get zoom dropouts every day. Pretty much. We're like, oh, we're on zoom. And like, oh, wait, what'd you say? Drop some packets there, right? Video degrades. Maybe it drops for, like two seconds.
- [13:22]
Host
It's happening to us now on this, this podcast recording.
- [13:26]
Austin Federa
There you go. Yeah. And like, it's fine on my end, but it's not fine, you know, something in between. The data I'm sending to you is getting dropped, whereas the data you're sending to me is totally fine, because these pipes are not symmetric. Right? What's going. Upload and download are not the same activities. There might be more geographic traffic heading from my direction to where you are. And so my packets are going to get, you know, dropped or scrambled or something along those lines. If we're on a video call, that's fine. But also, like, this is why we're using Riverside to record. The whole point of Riverside is it stores a local copy of the video and makes sure every single one of those bits of data is uploaded to the cloud correctly. So when you go and you edit the video after the Fact. And you upload it to all of your subscribers, they're getting this nice, pristine video quality. They don't have to deal with shitty zoom quality video. Right. Just to plug your show for a second. But that same problem applies to high performance systems too. Except if I don't get a bit of data, it's not like, oh, Well, I heard 95% of your sentence. I can probably guess what you were saying. The thing we all do every day where we're like, I'm pretty sure I know what this guy was talking about. You can't do that on a blockchain. You can't do that on a high performance system. You have to instead say, wait, sorry, the connection dropped. Can you tell me what that thing was again?
- [14:45]
Host
I think he meant I wanted to buy one Solana, not 10 Solana. Or I think, you know, it's like you had to have a factual 1.152,3 is exactly what he wanted. And that needs to be certain.
- [14:56]
Austin Federa
Exactly. Humans are very good at filling in the gaps. We don't want computers to fill in the gaps for blockchain. We want to be 100% sure. And so that means just as you have to do with a person, you have to go, what was that? Oh, yeah, I meant this. Okay, great. Yep, I've recorded it down. Now we can keep going. That takes time and all of that back and forth. Time is now time. The network is not producing blocks. It is not advancing forward or it's not able to reach consensus. And so the whole point of double zero is if we can build this new physical fiber network, this is like cables in the ground, physical fiber, like everything is physically interconnected to it, to itself. If we can get this built out and have it run by enough independent contributors that it has properties we all know and love in blockchain, like censorship, resistance, cryptographic security, economic security, we're going to be in a position where we can accelerate what's possible on blockchain by probably a decade. So we're in testnet now, but when mainnet hits and we have hundreds of gigabits per second of data, we have multicast running all these types of things. We can handle dozens of Solanas, dozens of networks that are targeting a million transactions per second. And the goal here is not to say like, okay, great, then we can push. I mean, maybe Solana decides to push itself to 10 million transactions per second. That would be awesome. But really, it's about saying the transition from 2G to 3G Internet is what made the Mobile phone revolution possible. I think people forget how much of a flop the iPhone was until it got 3G.
- [16:32]
Host
You can do anything with it until the App Store and those downloads and you could take them on the go and, like, that's where the magic happened, right?
- [16:39]
Austin Federa
Yeah, Like, I remember, like, you know, like, using like, my mom's iPhone or something when I was, like, a kid, and it would be like, oh, we're waiting, like 30 seconds to load the weather. You know, like, this was not like. But then suddenly you get to the 3G iPhone and dating changes forever. Taxis change forever. All the entire mobile revolution kicks off because the base layer connectivity between these devices, which were fundamentally awesome, but they weren't great if they were on WI Fi. That connectivity layer got fast enough that it could bring about social revolution and social change. And I really think that we're at a tipping point with Blockchain where we have all of the components. What we don't have is any of them running fast enough or cheap enough, really today.
- [17:23]
Host
Hey, look, I could absolutely get behind it. I think it's awesome, and I definitely think. I think we need it. I remember reading this one book, and it reminds me of you. And maybe this could be your new nickname, but it was about a guy named John Malone who, you know, it was called the Cable Cowboy. And so he was the guy.
- [17:42]
Austin Federa
Great response.
- [17:43]
Host
Yeah, great book. He was responsible for laying all this cable all around the world that, you know, all these, you know, things like AT&T could, you know, leverage and so on. And so what you're saying is that, you know, all of this, you know, call it traditional infrastructure, it's just not really equipped for, you know, a world of decentralized, you know, billions of transactions a second. So we need to upgrade it. The ip, you know, whatever version of IP we're on, it kind of maybe doesn't support it. Can. Is there anything that, like, the. The system can do without, like, that double zero, like, you know, that could maybe obviate double zero in a sense. It's like, if we just updated IPv7, would it then be able to support, you know, all these things that you're trying to do? And are you really trying to push, like, the world to get upgraded here or is. Is it just like we actually need something completely else?
- [18:35]
Austin Federa
Yeah, so this is. This is a great question, because I think a lot of people assume, and I kind of assumed at the beginning, that some of this was just a technology problem. Oh, people haven't invented this stuff. The stuff doesn't exist yet or something along those lines.
- [18:48]
Host
Right.
- [18:48]
Austin Federa
It is as much a technology problem as a business case problem. So the way that your ISP makes money on your end is they bill you every month for an Internet connection. Great. Okay, cool. But what happens from there? We all know that just because Verizon provides me Internet service, I can reach stuff that the Verizon network isn't on. This is, in fact, the point of the Internet is that I'm not just stuck to the Verizon stuff. I can go. If you're running a server in a data center connected into AT&T, my computer can still talk to it and we can download an episode or something along those lines. This is the whole point of the Internet, the interconnected networks. Right. So how does that work? Well, there's this whole billing system where basically it costs your ISP money when you access stuff that's not on their system and it costs the other system money when they access stuff that's on your system. Right. And so there's this really complicated billing arrangement between all these different ISPs, which effectively gets them into a system where they're incentivized not to give you the best quality of service, but to get rid of your data as quickly as possible. If they know it's not heading somewhere they can service, they would much rather push your data off onto someone else's network and make them have to try and figure out how to get you there. So if you actually like go and download like, you know, a traceroute system or something like that and run it from, from cli and you try and ping like a server in Japan and you watch every hop and every trace route that happens between you and there. Your packet is probably bouncing around the Eastern seaboard for a while before it actually starts heading across the United States. It's like hot potato completely, because everyone's just like, I don't want this packet. I don't want this packet. Because they're trying to get it to Tokyo. And there's not actually a ton of bandwidth that goes between the US and Tokyo. And so the question is, like, who's going to take it? Who's going to take it across the ocean? The crazy one is you can be in Argentina and talking to a server in Chile, 500 miles apart, and your packets will clear through Miami.
- [20:56]
Host
Wow.
- [20:56]
Austin Federa
The data all the way up and all the way back down.
- [20:59]
Host
It's physical traffic, right? At the end of the day, like, we don't think that it's like physical because we Think it's just light or just electricity, but there's, like, physical constraints. And this is actually bringing back to memory, like, Net neutrality. Like, there was this whole debate of, like, should all Internet traffic be treated equal? I don't know how it all kind of turned out. I. I think they nuked it.
- [21:21]
Austin Federa
It's totally gone in the United States.
- [21:22]
Host
Yeah. Yeah. Which is probably the right way to go. It's like you could kind of. It's not all created equal. There's people that are willing to pay a lot more to get their, you know, packet from Japan to America than just a guy who's trying to stream cat videos. It's like, there should be a marketplace for that. So, yeah, that's an interesting.
- [21:39]
Austin Federa
Here's the craziest piece. There is no marketplace for that.
- [21:42]
Host
Okay, so maybe that's what you're solving.
- [21:44]
Austin Federa
You would think that would exist, right? Like, you would think that, like, it's 2025. If I am Fortnite, I should be able to go somewhere and say, look, put our Fortnite traffic ahead of everyone else's traffic. We're going to give you a bunch of money. But I really want.
- [22:00]
Host
Not exist.
- [22:00]
Austin Federa
I really want the teens to be able to buy their skins. In order for them to buy the skins, they got to get the headshot. So we got. It doesn't exist. There's no universally accepted packet prioritization schema for the Internet where a company can just go and buy prioritization. If they did, Zoom would pay it. Zoom bills us, whatever, 12 bucks a month for, like, video conferencing. For some reason, we all pay for it. Like, if they could make it so our packets and we'd never get a drop in a Zoom call, they would do it. But here's the thing. This is like a classic problem that blockchain is really good at solving. There may be 40 companies between my house and your house, right? 40 different networks this thing is transiting through. How do you keep track of that accounting? How do you keep track of who gets paid? Right. These systems were never built for this type of thing. And so today, if you want to make sure your traffic always gets. If people in the United States can access your server in Tokyo, and you want to make sure that they can always have a great experience. You know what you do? You set up another server in the United States. This is called a CDN network, a content delivery network. This is Cloudflare. This is, you know, a whole bunch of companies that do that type of thing. Netflix does not have like one big data center. They have data centers in every country and most major cities in the United States to serve traffic locally, because they can't depend on the public Internet to actually deliver a high quality streaming experience, especially when new shows are coming out. So what they'll do is they'll put like an entire copy of the entire Netflix library in New Jersey. And so if I'm streaming it in New York, I'm going over the. Effectively. Like, we don't think of, like a city as a local area network, but it kind of is a local network. The connectivity between my house and New Jersey, like all of, like 12 miles away, is way better than the connectivity between my house and, say, Philadelphia or my house in Boston. Right. Even though the distances aren't that much greater, just the way that these networks have been built out. And so you have to sort of think about this and say, okay, well, if every big company in the world is using a CDN network, if every financial technology company in the world is doing high frequency trading also is effectively doing this, they have their own fiber cables run to the exchanges. They're trying to front run everyone and land their packets as quickly as possible. Why is blockchain stuck on the Internet? Right? And that was like the fundamental question. And, you know, my co founder, Matteo Ward actually tried to. He sort of like started pitching this and tried to build it in 2017, but blockchains weren't fast back then. Ethereum was the fastest blockchain around and it did 14 to 20 things per second. It just wasn't necessary. But we get to a point now where we have all these fast L1s, all these fast L2s, and, and it really, you know, you can see that the thing holding back these networks are the networks, right? Like, ironically, it is the, the Internet as the fundamental fabric is the thing holding back all these fast blockchains today.
- [25:01]
Host
Wow. No, there. It's, it's crazy that this is stuff that, you know, most people don't really even think about. Like, we think, oh, we get a Netflix show, but we don't think about how it's actually physically getting to us. We open a webpage and then you send a crypto transaction. You don't, you don't think about that stuff behind it. So, yeah, the first, you know, it's awesome that we were able to spend such a good chunk of time kind of unpacking that concept. And yet you did a really great job of kind of breaking that down for, for a 101 level. And so And I think this next question is kind of a good, good segue here, which is, you know, the name double Zero, I feel like that's a very descriptive, telling name that will actually even continue to kind of inform this, this entry level discussion here that we're understanding of like, you know, how are these blockchains and people actually talking to each other? So, so where's the name double zero come from?
- [25:50]
Austin Federa
So it started off as kind of like a code name just because we needed to call it something. And like all codenames, unfortunately they stick. So double zero refers to this idea of basically two concentric circles, an inner ring and an outer ring. And one of the things that 00 does is we actually employ a bunch of hardware accelerated filtration on the ingress and egress of the network. And so if you're two validators, right, on the 00 Network talking to one another, let's say they're Solana validators, they're sending all their traffic over this internal network. And that's sort of like safe, protected, secure space, because everything on the network is already kind of verified, right? We also have filtration on internal traffic too. So the two rings is more of like a logical construction than a physical construction. But then you can imagine stuff coming in from the outside, right? An RPC server located outside the 00 network, a validator located outside the double zero network. Suddenly there's a real possibility that the traffic that thing is sending is full of spam. And so we use hardware acceleration on FPGAs to do things like signature verification and transaction deduplication and throwing away of things like DDoS attacks and that type thing before it actually hits the network. Because right now what happens when a validator is building a block, they receive all the full force of the Internet sending them traffic, trying to block out their block, building capacity, all these types of things. And so by having double zero filtration, sort of intermediating that inbound traffic, what we hand off to validators are transactions that pass signature verification. Stuff that's not duplicate transactions. We block a bunch of stuff from getting to them that otherwise would have. And so it can make the whole network work faster because there's less sort of junk to sort through before it actually builds a block.
- [27:41]
Host
I love that.
- [27:42]
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- [28:12]
Austin Federa
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- [28:28]
Host
No, that makes perfect sense. And I like the name, and I like when names start as just inside jokes that kind of stick. Yeah, but so, so walk me through this idea because so I remember again going back to this, you know, lay idea of Lane, you know, physical cable and building physical infrastructure. I mean this is such a hard nut to crack because it's so capital intensive. I mean, yes, you know, where are we going to get the billions of dollars to build this? And so on and so forth. And I remember there's a company called Helium and they had the same idea and they were like, not the same idea as you, but they had this idea of like, we want to, you know, replace the Verizon's and the AT and T's the world. So you know, we're not going to build out the infrastructure, we're going to, you know, pay people to, to host hotspots or something like that. And so that was kind of how they tackled this idea of like, you know, capital expenditure. And so if, are, are you going to take the money that you raised to build out physical cable or are you going to try and incentivize people to contribute their cable or how does that all work?
- [29:28]
Austin Federa
Yeah, so we raised 28 million which is certainly not enough to be building like new cables. And so what we are basically working on here are there's a lot of. So these cables actually exist, right? There's a lot of them out there. They're just pretty inaccessible to like normal folks. And also the economic incentives don't really support like, apart from like the Ethereum foundation or the Solana foundation, like unless a foundation were going to take on this on their own. Like the economics just become very hard for an individual entity to do. So what Double Zero does is it's an open source protocol that allows contribution of bandwidth resources to the network. And so our earliest contributors include basically folks who already run private fiber networks themselves. So like Jump Trading is an example. We have a bunch of other like distributed global as an example, Terra Switch Latitude. Folks who already either run data centers or run fiber networks themselves are basically carving off, you know, 100 gigabits, 10 gigabits of their global networks and saying we're going to dedicate this to, to double zero.
- [30:35]
Host
So it's like Double zero is like a decentralized virtual toll road, basically network for all of your traffic.
- [30:41]
Austin Federa
Exactly, yes.
- [30:42]
Host
It's badass, man.
- [30:45]
Austin Federa
It's pretty cool. One of the craziest processes going through this. I'm obviously not the network engineer, you know, but we have an incredible founding team of engineers and Andrew McConnell is our CTO and co founder and the pace they've been building this thing is just like incredible. Like we got to, you know, test that up and running at this point. But it's been really interesting to see just how quickly this thing can, can, can go. And the whole idea of this with multiple independent contributors is if we built this as one centralized company, it would be a major censorship point in blockchain. And so instead by building this with multiple independent contributors, the idea is that the network is much more resilient. It has the type of multi party security that people usually expect from any project in blockchain. And the other thing too is folks can always fall back to the public Internet if 00 goes down or is compromised at some point in the future. Now they may go from doing a million transactions per second back to 10,000 transactions per second, but falling back to safe mode is much better than falling offline. Right. And so we think that we can work with all these networks and allow them to take advantage of the additional resources that Double Zero can throw at them while also building in the sort of security of like, well, if we have a bug or you know, something along those lines, they can fall back to using public Internet for these types of things too.
- [32:14]
Host
Totally. No, it's awesome. And just to help us think about how it would work so you know, you're not going to be interfacing with the everyday person who's making transactions, but you're really underneath the hood. And so does an Ethereum app developer kind of need to engage with Double Zero or does the Ethereum foundation actually need to get this kind of worked into the eips and worked into kind of the overall code base? And does, you know, aptos and sui and like, is this kind of initiative that you're taking on in order to get 0 integrated across all these networks? Like, how does that happen?
- [32:49]
Austin Federa
Yes, there's a bunch of different ways this can, can happen. So one of them is just quite simply that like the validator community says like, yeah, our goal is to go faster than the public Internet allows like, we are on board with this, we're going to try and adopt this technology. This is basically what happened in Solana. Like the core protocol devs are like, yeah, we want to build out a bunch of support for Double Zero and assuming the likes, it will adopt this thing and use it. There's other networks like L2s, for example, that even though they run centralized sequencers, they can still really benefit from the added features of security and these sorts of things that double zero provides. And so with the L2 is they're centralized companies, they're easy to talk to, they all have contact forms on the website. You can just send them a telegram, you can get on a call. It's quite easy. It's a lot harder on something like Solana or Ethereum to basically just reach consensus around. This is something worth doing. So we spent a bunch of time with the Solana community basically seeing if this idea was palatable to them because it was entirely possible that it could not be. Right. So if you are running like an L2 or you're building a new L1, the foundation tends to be the right entity to do the engagement with. But some of the protocol teams also, the folks building the core clients can be really great entry points as well. This requires minor protocol changes. You have to teach your client how to understand multicast and these sorts of things. But it's on the order of weeks of work, it's not months of work to bring a lot of these optimizations to it and then kind of rolling up one level from there. We also have RPCs and MEV systems as primary users of the network as well. So from a user perspective, they may never know, oh my transaction is going through 00. But they may be subscribed to an RPC provider that is operating on 00 or is even selling them like, hey, do you want to send your transaction via Double Zero? It's going to be faster and the deliverability is going to be better. I'm going to charge you more money for something like that. Right? You can see all of these the same way that stake weighted connections are more highly billed on Solana, the non stake weighted connections. So we're trying to basically be as like stay out of the prescription for how a lot of this stuff will work, but instead give developers the tools that they need to basically figure out like, okay, where would 00 fit in in our stack? And that's going to be a different answer from Solana than it will be for aptos or than it would be for Avalanche or it would be for, you know, an L2 running on the optimism stack or something like that.
- [35:31]
Host
Yeah, no, I completely agree and I think that's the right way to do it. Just gives people the ultimate flexibility. And at the end of the day it seems like it's pretty general purpose that it could kind of interface with many different networks.
- [35:45]
Austin Federa
We actually built it not just for blockchain. That's the other thing too.
- [35:50]
Host
Oh yeah, that makes sense too.
- [35:51]
Austin Federa
Yeah. You could see CDN networks getting built on top of this thing. Indexing services, ZK proving networks, AI training and inference centers, like all sorts of different types of systems. What we're really trying to do is, and this is like a more macro level blockchain story, but it applies outside of blockchain too is we are seeing like a very rapid winner take all market in the technology space. Like people are like, oh, the Nvidia GPUs are great. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got all that type of thing going on too. But like what we also really have to deal with are the, the fact that the cloud providers are just eating the world, right? They're starting to buy physical cables and build physical cables. Facebook has one of the most ambitious cable projects anyone's ever attempted, which is this giant round the world network that they're building out. And it's one of these things where we could wake up in 10 years and be in a world where all of the Internet is basically centralized under three or four companies. And we don't think that's great because these companies, what they're doing is they're trying to buy the physical infrastructure layer, right? The same way that DirecTV and all these AT&T are starting to try and buy HBO. You have the web two content companies like Facebook and Meta starting to try and buy physical infrastructure too. And their profit margins are just bigger. And that's why AWS is such a powerhouse. It is. And GCP and everything too. And so we really feel like we have to create a credible alternative to the web two companies as well. Because if you want indie games to be able to survive, they can't all be running on Microsoft Azure for their game engines.
- [37:31]
Host
Yeah, it's a good point. And it just reminds me like as we kind of go through this decentralized future, it really does look like this sort of cohort of all of these competing interests that are all incentivized maybe around the same outcome or the same maybe token. And so, you know, you have for instance, Jump Trading. And maybe insert. We'll just say ABC Trading Company. I don't know if that's a real company. We'll just say that's a company. And they, you know, they don't, they're. They're competitors in the open marketplace. They don't really want to share data. They don't want to, like, give other people advantages and stuff. But how do you basically incentivize them to come onto the network and share their resources and kind of be a part of this? Is there a token component to this?
- [38:21]
Austin Federa
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, tokens are. When you're talking about incentive alignment, there are few things that work better than a token, honestly. And so this is kind of the way we view this system is like if you are coming to something like the double Zero network and you're saying, hey, I'm going to bring capacity with me, validators are going to pay as a percentage of their earnings to operate on the network. And so that means that suddenly we have a whole bunch of pool of contributor rewards. And so if you are coming in and you're bringing a network link that's quite useful, you'll be rewarded more for providing that network link. If you're bringing a network link that's less useful, we basically use Shapley values to determine the incremental value that each link produces in the network and compensate them as such. Yeah, exactly. And so the other thing too is this is the first time that we've seen a network built where there's a revenue share model. Right. So typically if you go and you're a fiber provider and let's say jump trading is buying cable from you, they're paying you. They might be paying you $300,000 a month for a really fast link, but they're paying you in US Dollars for that link. And one of the nice things about 00 is folks will actually be paid as a percentage of the economic activity going over it.
- [39:46]
Host
Wow, that sounds awesome. And, and at the end of the day, you know, I think I heard you mentioned testnet. Is this something that, you know, you guys are feeling like we're six to 12 months out or is this still, you know, we just started and before we could kind of get this out in the wild, it's going to be, you know, several years.
- [40:07]
Austin Federa
No, no, we are, we are aiming to go live this year.
- [40:10]
Host
Oh, wow.
- [40:11]
Austin Federa
With mainnet.
- [40:12]
Host
That's awesome.
- [40:13]
Austin Federa
Yeah.
- [40:13]
Host
Okay. Well, we'll definitely, definitely have you back on when you, when you go live with mainnet to get the full breakdown. But while you're here, I, and I remember last time we spoke, you had a political science background as well. And is that. Am I right?
- [40:28]
Austin Federa
Yes.
- [40:28]
Host
Yeah. And obviously the crypto climate, because we want to, we want to take a look at just with you kind of what's going on in the world governmentally with crypto. And obviously there's, there's a lot that's been changing. But, but how do you kind of think about, you know, double zero growing in this new environment? Right, because if we think about, for those past four years, it was very antagonistic to crypto founders. And, and nobody was talking about, you know, crypto being on the governmental balance sheet. Nobody was thinking about crypto really much more than potentially, you know, speculative investments. Now people are like, hey, this could re, you know, Elon's redoing the government, the treasury, maybe they're going to add blockchains there. You know, they're letting people, you know, kind of, you know, really let their imagination run wild with how much crypto could get intertwined here. What's your take on all this?
- [41:22]
Austin Federa
So I would say the, the change in D.C. is like, palpable. We feel it constantly in crypto, the difference between an administration that viewed crypto as something that they wanted to remove and one that views crypto as something they want to support or at least don't care particularly much about. The change in tone of the sec. Dropping all of these lawsuits has been really, really interesting to watch and see. Now, at the same time, you've got a bunch of like, noise doesn't mean anything. Like the Strategic Digital Asset Reserve and stuff. It's just, it's just noise. Like, we actually don't want, we don't want the government owning all these tokens. Like, you really want the next, like, bitcoin, like, downfall to be. Because, like, someone in treasury decided this was a good time to sell $2 billion worth of Bitcoin. Like, like the minute. This is the thing that people never understand is if you want the government to buy, at some point, you've also got to want the government to sell, right? And then at that point, like, oh, and like, yeah, yeah, you didn't like when the VCs are dumping on you, imagine how much you're going to like when the Treasury Department's dumping on you. And so this is the thing with the strategic reserve is it never really made much sense to me. But we'll set that aside for a minute. The rest of the change in D.C. is really noticeable. We have Companies reaching out to us, saying, hey, do you want to come to D.C. with us? We're going to talk to a bunch of senators and House members and their staffers and Senate Banking Committee and these sorts of things about crypto and crypto policy and how to make sure that stablecoins further US dollar dominance and help us maintain the US dollar as the global reserve currency against rising pressure elsewhere. And that is suddenly a pro America, pro national security blockchain powered thing. Right? And like, totally, yeah. It's not the same thing at all about like this next gen of defense companies that are like, you know, furthering America's national security interests in a very different way. But as we all know, economic security is a real form of security. And so, you know, maintaining US dollar dominance is a really powerful thing globally. And crypto can pay, can play a really big part in that. The other piece I think that we finally got through with NDC is like this idea that US Founders are being pushed abroad for no reason and none of them actually want to go abroad. We're seeing some US Founders start to come back. One thing I have been trying to push for and lobby for is basically crypto foundation repatriation. So in the first Trump administration, they did this big thing where companies were allowed to bring back money that they were holding overseas and they had some special carve outs they didn't have to pay huge amounts of taxes on it.
- [44:13]
Host
Interesting.
- [44:14]
Austin Federa
No crypto foundation wants to be based in the Caymans. No crypto foundation wants to be in Panama. Maybe they want to be in Switzerland. They don't want to be in Dubai. They don't want to be in the uae. They don't want to be in Abu Dhabi. There's nothing wrong with those places, but they're just simply much less politically stable and legally stable than the United States. The United States is the best country in the world to build a business in. And so if we can carve out a framework where crypto foundations are able to move back to the United States, they're able to get the same types of like, carve outs and protections that they would get abroad. No one's opposed to paying taxes, Right? The US has the most startups and the most profitable startups of anywhere in the world. As long as we can get those same types of carve outs for crypto foundations, a bunch of folks would love to move back to the United States. And so my hope is that over the next four years, we are going to see a framework developed and passed through Congress that allows Crypto companies to come back to the United States and be based here.
- [45:14]
Host
Well, man, that's a, that's a really hot take and I'm glad I asked the question. I know it's kind of out of left field, but it's. And I knew you're the guy to ask it too, because that's something I hasn't, have not heard anybody kind of propose yet. It's a very, you know, original thought and very cool to kind of hear you break that down. And yeah, I know you said, you know, you've got different folks reaching out to you to get to dc. I hope you're saying yes because as, as a guy who's, you know, kind of in the same industry and so on, definitely would love to have you represent our industry to the folks that are decision makers in D.C. because, you know, you, you, you're well spoken and you, you also speak their languages as well. So.
- [45:53]
Austin Federa
Yeah, we have.
- [45:54]
Host
Saying yes.
- [45:54]
Austin Federa
Well, thank you. I, I am doing a bit of it. But we also have a. I mean, we have a great collection of people down in D.C. nowadays, actually, as a, as an industry, I think they often don't get enough of a shout out to, like, the folks at Coin center who, like, they are the ones standing up for your digital civil liberties. They are the ones who fought the tornado cash sanction and won. Like, Coin center deserves your money and your donation. Blockchain association's doing some great things. There's great bitcoin groups as well, advocating down in D.C. and then Stan with crypto. Right. The Coinbase thing, as much as Coinbase is competitive with a bunch of crypto things in some areas, there's other areas, like public policy, where like, Paul and the team in D.C. have been doing an incredible job lobbying for the industry. And so I think the biggest thing is just like, don't get too jaded with dc. Politics is always messy. Things always move slower than you want. But that's not a reason to tune out engagement with D.C. because at the end of the day, like, it is. It is how change happens.
- [46:58]
Host
Totally. Yeah. Somebody was on the podcast show recently. It was like, you know, people ask me why I spend so much time and he's like a hedge fund manager. Why do people spend so much time, time in D.C. you know, every line of policy that's written moves the market a billion dollars one way or another.
- [47:12]
Austin Federa
Right.
- [47:12]
Host
It unlocks or restricts that value. So he's like, you just gotta be close to the policy.
- [47:16]
Austin Federa
Yeah.
- [47:17]
Host
And no. Awesome. This was, this was awesome. And again, like I said, when you, when you launch Mainnet, we'd love to have you back on before we let you go. Where can people stay in touch with the journey and maybe even get involved?
- [47:29]
Austin Federa
Yeah. So Double Zero XYZ is our main website. It's got links to join as a validator if you wanna run a salon. A validator or arpa, RPC on testnet. We also have links to contribute bandwidth if you run a fiber network or you're interested in starting one up or also double zero on Twitter, you can find me there at Austin Underscore Federa.
- [47:50]
Host
Awesome. And yeah, for those who are listening. And that'll all be in the show notes as well. And that's double zero spelled out D O U B L E z e r o dot x, y z. Not just 0,00.
- [48:03]
Austin Federa
Yes.
- [48:04]
Host
Wanted that to be clear because I don't know what's at 00, but that's, that's one that you need to buy. You need to buy that domain.
- [48:11]
Austin Federa
Oh, man, talk about something. We need an open market for domain buying.
- [48:16]
Host
Awesome. Well, hey, we, we appreciate your time and everybody home listening. We appreciate your time. Thanks for tuning in. Come back same time, same place next week. We'll have some more great guests for you. Take care.
- [48:36]
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