B (5:29)

And so Double Zero is trying to resolve that. How, like, how does Double Zero solves this problem?

A (5:36)

So Double Zero is a private dedicated fiber network, but instead of being run by one company, like all of Amazon's network is run by Amazon, all of Jump's network is run by Jump. You know, same with all of these players. We have 12 independent contributors that are all contributing high performance fiber to this network. And so what happens is it appears to the users as one homogeneous network, the same way that Ethereum appears to anyone transacting on it as one homogeneous virtual machine. But it's run by thousands and thousands of servers all around the world. It's the same idea, except instead of computing, instead of contributing compute, they're contributing network connections and bandwidth. And so what this means is if you have a validator sitting on the 00 network in, let's say, New York, and you're trying to talk to another validator in Singapore, or even RPC in New York, trying to send a transaction to a validator in Singapore, that data now moves over the fastest, most direct route possible, which in our case would probably be from New York to Chicago to basically directly over to Singapore at that point. And so you get much more direct routing, which has much lower latency and also much higher bandwidth. But there's kind of another secret component of this, which is there's a measurement on the public Internet called jitter. And jitter is sort of the, you can think of it as the standard deviation of latencies. So if I run a test and I get, you know, 50 different numbers for how long it takes me to talk to a server, that number changes. On the public Internet it can change by really large amounts. So we've seen just in some of our testing from like, you know, California to Singapore, that, you know, you'll have a consistent data Transmission rate of maybe like a 300 millisecond latency. But sometimes those packets are getting there in 250 milliseconds and sometimes they're getting there in 800 milliseconds. It's really unpredictable. It's like traffic from like JFK to like Manhattan. Sometimes it's 45 minutes, sometimes it's two and a half hours. It just depends on what else is going on on the Internet.

B (7:39)

And so is it. It's kind of like its own Internet. Like basically the validator would hook up. Okay, yeah, got it.

A (7:46)

So we describe this sort of as like we are building a parallel Internet for high performance distributed systems like blockchains.

B (7:54)

And because this involves like a physical connection.

A (7:57)

Yeah.

B (7:58)

Please explain how you know, because yeah, this is not a world I or I think most crypto people are familiar with. So how are you creating that? Because this is like, it's got to span the globe, right?

A (8:10)

So it does, yes. So at launch of mainnet beta, we have about 70 different fiber links involved in the network, which goes to, you know, we're on five continents at launch in about 30 different cities. So the important piece here is we are not building new fiber lines the same way that, you know, if you are running a validator, you show up to a company or you buy a bunch of parts yourself and you say, hey, like I'm going to, you know, rent a computer from you or I'm going to buy the parts and assemble a computer. There is an entire subsea network of fiber and terrestrial fiber that exists today that companies can take long term leases on. And so our contributors are folks who either have, you know, ownership access to fiber or they have long term leases on that fiber and they're contributing it to the double zero network. And that's kind of the main, the main point of their contribution is that they make that capacity available for others. They earn tokens as a result, because it's a token project. And that's kind of how we build alignment around everyone to build this network. Now when you're dealing with the traditional financial world, there's not actually that many places the network has to reach. If you are a jump and you're building a global trading network, how many real major financial trading hubs are there in the world? There's not actually that many. Blockchains are very different. Just on Solana. Solana is run in over 300 different data centers all around the world. And that's just Solana. You expand that to Aptos and SUI and Ethereum and IPFS and Shelby and all of these different blockchain systems, let alone, like, you know, espresso systems and succinct. And there's just a lot of different physical locations in the world that blockchain infrastructure is run. And it's totally infeasible for any one company to wire this all up the same way it was totally infeasible for any one company to build the Internet. But that's effectively what we're doing here. We're trying to rebuild the fundamental fabric of how distributed systems communicate using technologies that are faster than you can get on the public Internet.

B (10:08)

Okay, wow, this is so interesting. So basically, like. So I have so many questions, but one of the things that comes to mind is the only people that would, like, be motivated to use this are people who want to use it for crypto transactions. Right. Or is it because. So basically it sounds like what you're building is something where there's a special benefit for people that want to do that. But I was also thinking, like, the Internet, you know, nobody controls who gets on the Internet, so you're not, like, necessarily controlling who gets on there. It's just like. Because it's a question of, like, could it be spammed or could. Yeah, so, yeah.

A (10:49)

So let me. Let me kind of take, like, two things you said, and then we'll get to sort of some of the implications of it. So traders, this is absolutely a very attractive product for traders in the sense of they now have more determinism in how they send a transaction. Like, right now, if you are a trader in a traditional market and you are going to say, oh, there's a price arbitrage event between, let's say, the New York Stock Exchange and the cme. You know exactly how long it takes your trade to get there. You can say, like, look, this is our private network. We know it takes down to, like, the microsecond, how long it takes my trade to actually get executed. If you're trading on the public Internet, you have no idea. It could be 35 milliseconds, it could be 350 milliseconds. And so that determinism is really important for traders in feeling confident to make trades. They can quote tighter markets, they can act on smaller arbitrages, all these sorts of things on the validator and blockchain side, this allows basically more resources and more capacity. And so what we're basically hoping to do is accelerate the growth of blockchain protocols by about a decade that the folks at Solana can Say, look, we have, you know, we have at some point, 70, 80, 90% of the Solana network running on double zero. We can now start jacking up the parameters. Maybe we can go to 200 million cus. Maybe we can go from 400 millisecond block times down to 250 millisecond block times. And it allows basically these networks that are currently limited by the public Internet, we want to make it the software engineer's job to make the networks faster again. Right now it's on the public Internet and waiting for the public Internet to get fast. I mean, there's not a great track record of that. Right. The public Internet eats bandwidth as quickly as you can basically throw it at it. And there's not a monetary incentive to do so. Which is why, like you would think, oh, Facebook, giant public Internet company, they must use the public Internet for everything. Turns out they don't. They're actually the biggest investor in private fiber and subsea fiber in the world right now. And they build it out because the public Internet is too slow to show Instagram reels to people. And if you, if your Instagram reels don't load, incredibly snappy, you're not going to keep scrolling, you're not going to see ads. Facebook is, at the end of the day, an ad tech company. And so, you know, if the public Internet is too slow for Instagram reels, we think it's probably too slow for blockchain to really start competing with traditional finance.

B (13:10)

Okay. And so for users who want to get on it, like you said, that they have to contribute some of this. So how does that part work?

A (13:18)

Yeah, so if you want to become a contributor, those are really like, it's mostly businesses that have access to fiber or who have the expertise to manage private fiber links. But if you are a Solana validator, a validator on a different ecosystem, an RPC provider, and you want to be able to tap into this network, it's actually quite easy to do. You can access it from a huge number of data centers all around the world. And we basically have like a software tunnel that connects in from wherever your server is run to the 00 network. And it'll basically offer you. The really cool part about this is it is completely coexists with the public Internet. So we're not asking you to replace your public Internet connection. We're asking you to supplement it with 00. So if the thing you're trying to talk to, if 00 is the fastest path to talk to it, it'll talk over the 00 network, but if it's the public Internet, then it will just talk over the public Internet. Computers are really good at figuring out what is the fastest path when they're presented with the options. This is like a base level feature of pretty much the entire networking stack on a computer nowadays. And so this is the cool part is we just get to drift off of 30 years of high performance computing engineering that's just never been applied in this way to blockchains and decentralized systems.

B (14:33)

Okay, so this sounds like a B2B product. And obviously everybody knows in Ethereum you also have something called solo stakers. I know, I know that's not necessarily what's on. It is, but like for. Because the way you talked about it is like open to any blockchain. So for a solo staker on Ethereum, can they not access this?

A (14:54)

So Ethereum, I mean, they could access it, but Ethereum doesn't really require anyone to use this like Ethereum. And this is not like a knock on Ethereum, but it is designed to be slow. It is intentionally. Blocks are very long. They don't take very much data. Every time someone tries to shorten block times or add more resources to it, there's, I would call it like a social and moralistic opposition to that from a lot of core contributors, which is totally fine. That's the mission that that network wants to go in. Like, who am I to tell them otherwise? And. But if you're an L2 and you want to actually be able to compete with fast execution networks, that is the mission that all these L2s talk about. You listen to Mega Eth and they're not saying our goal is that this runs in a shoebox in your closet. The goal is that we can actually compete as the fastest execution layer out there. There are networks where this is not going to be useful for them because of some of the choices and design considerations they've made. Bitcoin miners are another great example. I don't really see a bitcoin miner as wanting to operate on double zero, but MEV systems like Flashbots actually very well might take use of a network like double zero.

B (16:06)

Okay, right, that makes sense. So then basically explain how, because obviously you also have this token 2Z.

A (16:14)

Yeah.

B (16:15)

So how, when, when I. So let's say I'm one of these, you know, validators or whatever and I can contribute to the network. How do, what do I do and how do I earn the twosie?

A (16:26)

Yeah. So if you are showing up as just a Like a Solana or Sui Aptos validator that wants to use the network you're actually going to pay in to gain access to it. The same way that you pay money to a data center to like rent space in a data center or something like that. If you are someone who wants to come and bring fiber to the network, first off, thank you, I'd love to talk. And then pretty much what happens at that point is you connect in your fiber to the rest of the network. And we do physically mean plug it in. Like at some point there's a guy in a data center somewhere plugging a cable into another cable. Like, this is a very physical network at the end of the day. But we have a model for reward distribution. It's a little bit different than a normal proof of stake network. We use something called proof of utility, which is a system that more closely resembles proof of work. And I'll kind of get into why in a second. But if you think about a system like 00, we are not securing state. This is effectively a stateless network. What we have to secure is data that's momentarily in transit and in flight. So we don't need $2 billion of security securing $200 million of USDC on 00 because it's not a stateful network like we are. We are not a smart contract blockchain that people deploy stuff to. We want smart contract networks to operate on top of double zero. And so because of that, we use something called Shapley values, which is this economic concept that is kind of how much worse would this system be if you took this one piece out of it? You know, like the Jenga meme of like, you know, all of software engineering and this tiny little piece in the corner. A Shapley value formula would assign a huge amount of value to that little thing in the corner. Even though it's tiny and it's small small and it looks pretty puny. It is in that model absolutely critical to holding up the whole component of the system. And so it would get a really high reward coefficient on the double zero network. Conversely, if someone else comes in and builds a buttress onto that tower of Jenga bricks, again, this meme is getting maybe two down in a rabbit hole for it. But basically the more, the less valuable an individual link becomes, the less rewards it gets. And this has some really nice properties. So one of the great things about Bitcoin is if I Show up with 20% of the hash power, I earn 20% of the rewards averaged out over enough period of time doesn't matter if I'm Michael Saylor or if I own zero bitcoin. My rewards are directly proportional to my contributions to that network. And we have that same property on on double zero.

B (19:08)

Okay. And just to understand, so let's say that Perth is like one of the places then if I'm like the last leg to Perth, which I picked it because it's the most remote or isolated city on earth, but then, but, but then somebody else is like one of the 100 pieces in New York City, the person connecting to Perth will be there, they'll earn more 2z is that how to think about that if there's.

A (19:32)

Also validators using it at the end. So most protocols have some sort of passive emissions or passive rewards just sort of thanks for existing. Here's some tokens. We don't have any of that on 00. So capacity is only rewarded if there's a paying customer effectively that's at the end of your fiber line that's using it or is somehow using you in transit. So it's possible in your Perth example that there's actually like six different contributors that that data would pass through on its way there and so each person in line would basically be rewarded proportional to their contribution over the public Internet performance.

B (20:11)

Okay, okay, that makes sense. So in a moment we're going to talk a little bit more about like issues around the token. But first a quick word from the sponsors make the show possible.

C (20:20)

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A (22:08)

Tickets.

B (22:09)

Back to my conversation with Austin. So we, you know, mentioned this token. You know, people are earning in it. Are there any other roles for the token?

A (22:20)

So the token is the way that validators who want to operate on the network Basic or any system that wants to transmit or receive data, they basically pay for that access in the double zero token. And then what happens is, and you know, there's, there's some nice sort of user friendly components of this too. Like if you're a Solana validator, you can pay in Sol and it's swapped into the native token just to, you know, there have been cases where sequencers go offline because someone forgot to top up their eth balance and we don't want to be in a position of kicking validators offline because they forgot to top up their double zero balance. But if you're something like an rpc which doesn't have an on chain revenue source, you can just natively pay in the double zero token to access it. And then approximately 50% of those double zero tokens are burned and the other 50% is distributed out to contributors according to that Shapley formula as network rewards.

B (23:13)

Okay. And then I, I'm sure you know, because I saw you answering these tweets online, but there's been some chatter about the token allocation.

A (23:20)

Sure.

B (23:21)

Some people were taking issue with the fact that jump received 28% with 5% being unlocked from day one. The rest would unlock over four years. Why did they get that deal?

A (23:33)

Yeah, so we have basically two Labs companies at launch, unlike most projects do. And we were, you know, I'm very happy with the current regulatory landscape, but we literally just got a no action letter from the SEC for the, for portions of the double zero token. But we don't know if this is going to last forever. Politics change very quickly in the United States and, and internationally as well. And so we set the project up from day one with multiple independent contributors. And so Malbec Labs is one of the core Labs groups contributing to the network and the Fire Dancer team at JUMP is another one. And so there's sort of like you could say three different components of where that allocation comes from. One is a core contributor grant to them which is commensurate with a multi year commitment to developing core technologies for the protocol. Another is as the first network contributor that came on board. So JUMP was actually the first one to contribute a slice of their global high frequency data network to the protocol, which sort of set us ahead probably 12 to 18 months at least in the project timeline. It's how we're actually able to launch the project within a year of announcing it. And it was really instrumental in getting others on board as well. And they also were one of our first investors. And so, and so that number comes from a lot of different places. The other thing to Remember with the 00 Network is a validator network is quite cheap to operate. If you look at sort of insight. Okay, we're launching like a 40 validator network. Each of those machines is $700 to $1500 a month to run. There are links in the 00 network that cost upwards of almost a million dollars a year to operate just on the fiber routes. And so it's a very high, both CAPEX and OPEX network to run. So it's very different than a traditional blockchain protocol from that perspective. But this is also part of why we have this proof of utility reward system where just because a contributor owns a lot of tokens doesn't mean they're going to earn a lot of rewards.

B (25:35)

Okay, so I don't know, I'm realizing, I don't know if I fully understand this. So is double zero like operating this network? But then the pieces come together with the, with the various individual contributors in their tokens. So it's like you have the centralized company, but then you also have the decentralized piece where people can contribute. Is that how to think about it?

A (25:56)

So you should sort of think about each of the network contributors. Like if we're going to make an analogy to how a traditional compute blockchain works, you know, Anza or you know, Prism or Lighthouse, they build a validator client. That's the work that Malbec Labs and the 00 foundation do. And then multiple independent entities operate the actual validators. And so each network contributor is effectively playing that role of a validator where they're showing up with their own owned capacity to contribute to the system the same way that, you know, staking facilities shows up with their own validator P2P shows up with their own validator. You know, these validators are not run by the centralized company or the foundation team in that model. So it's very similar here. Where Malbec Labs does not own or operating the fiber Links. The Double Zero foundation does not own or operate any of the fiber links.

B (26:50)

Okay, so Malbec Labs is like, almost like the organizer. And are you. So I actually didn't realize. Are you affiliated with Malbec Labs?

A (26:56)

No, I'm at the foundation.

B (26:58)

Oh, okay. Got it.

A (26:59)

So, yeah, I own no equity in Malbec Labs or any other type of exposure to Malbec Labs.

B (27:05)

Okay, so. So they're kind of like the developers and like organizers, but then it's the actual people who are contributing the exact pie then. Okay, no, so it's like. It's like. Yeah, it's like if you create a game, but everybody has to bring their pieces to make the game, then okay, yeah, sure.

A (27:24)

Or you create a blockchain and you need to get a bunch of validators to actually run the thing. Right. It really is that exact same idea where the network is run by the people who choose to show up and contribute to it. It's not run by the company developing the software.

B (27:39)

Okay, got it.

A (27:40)

Yeah.

B (27:41)

So explain a little bit more about the no action letter, because I think it actually has implications for depin generally. Yeah, so, yeah, explain even also how you got that, because I think you had to request that. Right?

A (27:54)

Yeah. So no action letters were something that a lot of projects tried to go after a number of years ago. It's basically a document from the securities and Exchange Commission, or cftc. In this case, it's SEC that says that you apply for. For what's called, like, proactive relief. So we went to them and said, hey, we want to do this thing. We would love if you evaluated this thing and told us if you. If you see any concerns about work, it could run afoul of a securities law. And so in this case, we prepared a letter with Cooley, which is the law firm that helped us with this, and our general counsel, Mari, obviously ran the whole thing. But effectively what it did is it laid out why, like, how token flows on 00 work, how the reward contribution model on works, which, you know, was. Was very attractive to the folks reviewing this request. And they had a whole series of questions. Like, I think a lot of times these. These folks who work for the government get a bad reputation. They're very thorough and diligent in what they're doing. And we actually found like a Very willing partner at the SEC here, where they wanted to make sure that what we were doing would not run afoul of securities laws, in their view. But they also wanted to help support, you know, crypto being coming back to the United States. And so it was a really great experience working with them. There's two components that we received, what's called relief for that are covered as part of the no action letter. The main one that was the most important to us are the contributor reward payouts. And so this is sort of most of our potential contributor groups, they're not crypto native people at all. They're, you know, companies like NTT or Lumen or, you know, these companies that sometimes they're public, sometimes they're owned by private equity firms, but they operate fiber cables, they run ships. You know, they're not sophisticated securities lawyers, especially when it comes to crypto. And so all of the adoption hurdles that we've seen with traditional finance and uncertainty around, can I accept the stablecoin? What if I have to pay a gas fee? Like, there were years of companies like Visa and MasterCard just being unsure about what they were allowed to do, even though they wanted to do this. And so this no action letter, one of the most important components of it is it gives an answer to a fiber contributor who is wondering, like, if I receive these tokens, is that a securities transaction? How am I supposed to think about that? They have actually a framework now where they can say, look, the SEC has said, as this is structured, we do not view this as a securities transaction, which, like, to crypto folks, may seem small. I don't think anyone listening to the show, like, has concerns about receiving something that could someday be deemed a security. But if you are a giant multinational corporation that has to build fiber everywhere in the world, and you have regulators from many different places that are asking you questions all the time, you don't want to add one more agency asking questions to that list. And so we think this is pretty big for any type of project that needs to interface with more traditional actors, especially when the contributions they're providing to the protocol require significant effort. This is not some sort of passive activity. Being a contributor to 00actually requires a ton of work. So Galaxy, which is one of the contributors to us, they have a whole team of people just on getting their fiber links set up and operating. And there's kind of this meme of like, oh, the sharks bit the fiber cable. Well, fiber cables do get cut pretty regularly. Even in our testnet, we had several fiber Cuts that occurred and the contributors have to respond. They have to update stuff on chain to say, hey look, this route is no longer available anymore. They have to call people and get maintenance estimates and all this thing the minute you touch the real world. Software is so comparatively easy to. When like there's a guy with a backhoe who dug in the wrong place and now has caused like a fiber outcut, which is, which happens all the time where some fishermen tried to fish in the wrong spot and they caught a fiber line and now the line is going to be down for three days while they get a repair ship out there. It's wild when you have to deal with physical infrastructure.

B (32:08)

Yeah, yeah. It's like becoming a homeowner versus renting. It's like, oh my God, I'm the one who has to fix this.

A (32:14)

Yes.

B (32:15)

Yeah. And just to, you know, flesh this out about the Deepin aspect, like hester Purse wrote. SEC's Commissioner Hester Purse, aka Cryptomom, wrote a little statement and she said, quote, rely. Rather than relying on centralized corporate structures to coordinate activity, Deepin projects enlist participants to provide real world capabilities such as storage, telecommunications, bandwidth mapping or energy through open and distributed peer to peer networks. And then she basically said, like, these projects are allocating tokens as compensation for work performed or services rendered, not as investments with an expectation of profit.

A (32:50)

Also a pretty good pun in the headline.

B (32:54)

Oh, I didn't catch that. What did it say?

A (32:57)

It says deep in statement.

B (32:58)

Oh yeah, Nice. I like it. Okay, so last question for an everyday user, because you know, everything we talked about, sort of back end.

A (33:09)

Yeah.

B (33:10)

For an everyday user, if this project succeeds, like how will crypto feel different when they're transacting? Or like what would be capable that isn't capable now? Like how will things change for them?

A (33:20)

It's kind of like the move from 3G connectivity on your cell phone to 4G and LTE and 5G. It is just all the things you can normally do are much faster. You don't have to worry about congestion. That's kind of the short term where everything just feels snappier and feels more responsive. You have more deterministic ability in landing transactions, spreads on chain get tighter. Basically everything improves and starts to resemble more like a traditional market structure while still being built on these giant decentralized distributed systems. Over the long term though, there's actually people who are building new L1s and L2s today that are building assuming the whole thing will run on 00. And so they're able to make significantly different architectural decisions because they can assume that they're going to have technologies like multicast available, which is basically hardware acceleration of packet replication. And it makes it much easier to get state updates out to all of the computers that need to receive them to continue validating the network. They can assume they have 100 gigabits of global connectivity they can use, as opposed to the sort of typical, you know, 5 gigabits or less that are available to most validators today. And so it's just about being able to build systems that are more performant. And I think it'll take probably a few years for people to really realize the full benefit of this, but we're going to, you know, if we do our job correctly. This is actually what gets, like NASDAQ trading on chain. This is what gets better. Connections between tokenized equities and traditional equities and having those markets trade at closer parity. I think you saw with hyperliquid, like Price Discovery, maybe just for a moment, every once in a while, moves back on chain. I want to see Price Discovery move on chain or at least move in parallel on chain in both equities and crypto markets.

B (35:11)

All right, well, it's been super fascinating chatting with you. Congratulations on the launch, and we look forward to seeing how this pans out.

A (35:18)

Thanks.

C (35:20)

Unchained is produced by Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdar.

A (35:26)

Thanks for listening.