The narrative of Solana’s scaling has historically focused on software clients like Firedancer and Agave. However, DoubleZero, the infrastructure project led by former Solana Foundation strategy lead Austin Federa, argues that the next bottleneck isn't code—it's physics. The public internet, optimized for reachability rather than speed, cannot support the "Nasdaq on-chain" vision of internet capital markets. DoubleZero has effectively built a private internet for crypto, utilizing OSI Layer 1, 2, and 3 optimizations to bypass public congestion. The network has quietly achieved critical mass, now underpinning approximately 40% of Solana by stake and 50% of validators via 3.4 terabits per second of capacity.

This is not merely a theoretical upgrade; it is a deployment of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) infrastructure standards to a decentralized network. DoubleZero announced the rollout of Multicast, a hardware acceleration technology for packet replication that is unavailable on the public internet. In live tests, Multicast demonstrated a 100-millisecond advantage over the standard Turbine protocol for shred propagation between London and Frankfurt. Perhaps most significant for institutional operators is the efficiency gain: testing with Jito revealed a 99.96% reduction in bandwidth usage for ShredStream, drastically lowering the hardware overhead required to run high-performance validators.

Unlike traditional private networks run by centralized entities like Google or Amazon, DoubleZero operates as a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). It aggregates 15 independent fiber contributors who provide the physical cables—"cables running on the ocean floor, over mountains, under cities." This structure allows the network to offer routes that are statistically superior to the public internet, such as a Frankfurt-to-Tokyo link that is 40% faster than the best public circuit available today.

Looking ahead to 2026, the project is tackling the geographic centralization of Solana’s stake, which currently clusters around connectivity hubs in Germany and the US. DoubleZero is launching a delegation program to incentivize validators to relocate to historically high-latency regions, including the UAE, Brazil, Mainland China, and South Africa. By laying physical fiber and providing economic incentives for validators to use it, DoubleZero aims to drag the "center of gravity" of Solana’s stake outward, ensuring the network is physically robust enough to handle global capital markets.