DoubleZero 209321 The New Internet (TNI)

The internet’s a cartel, holding innovation hostage. Enter DoubleZero: telecom veteran Mateo Ward and Solana strategist Austin Federa are building a high-performance, decentralized physical network to break free. Starting with blockchain’s toughest demands, DoubleZero is forging a multi-tenant future for decentralized applications — a new internet, hardwired for efficiency.

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The Ferrari Stuck in Traffic: Why Our Internet Needs an Upgrade

Imagine owning a Ferrari, a marvel of engineering designed for blistering speed and unparalleled performance.

Now, imagine that Ferrari perpetually stuck in rush-hour traffic on a congested city street.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

This vivid analogy, often invoked by the brilliant minds behind DoubleZero, perfectly encapsulates the state of our modern internet.

Despite its apparent ubiquity and speed, the internet, as we know it, is a cartel, a centralized system riddled with inefficiencies that hinder true high-performance and innovation.

It’s a network built on compromises, where the fastest routes are often inaccessible, and the promise of instant global communication is frequently bogged down by unseen bottlenecks.

This isn’t just an abstract problem for tech enthusiasts; it’s a fundamental limitation impacting everything from financial trading to the very backbone of decentralized technologies like blockchain.

The current internet, while functional, is far from optimal.

It’s a system where data often takes circuitous routes, where latency is an unpredictable variable, and where the dream of truly instantaneous, high-throughput communication remains just that—a dream.

But what if there was a way to break free from this digital gridlock?

What if we could build a new internet, one that is not only faster and more efficient but also inherently fairer and more decentralized?

This is the audacious vision of DoubleZero, a project spearheaded by two industry titans, Mateo Ward and Austin Federa, who are setting out to revolutionize how we connect, communicate, and transact in the digital age.

Their mission: to build a high-performance, decentralized network that overcomes the limitations of the current internet, starting with the most demanding use case—blockchain—and with a long-term vision to power a new generation of decentralized applications.

Join us as we delve into their journey, their groundbreaking approach, and the profound implications of their work for the future of the internet.

The Architects of a New Internet: Mateo and Austin’s Journey to DoubleZero

Behind every groundbreaking innovation are the visionaries who dare to challenge the status quo.

In the case of DoubleZero, these architects are Mateo Ward and Austin Federa, two individuals with deep roots in high-performance networking and the burgeoning world of blockchain.

Their combined experience, spanning decades in telecommunications, finance, and crypto, has uniquely positioned them to tackle the monumental task of rebuilding the internet from the ground up.

Mateo Ward: The Telecom Veteran’s Quest for Speed

Mateo Ward, a self-proclaimed “network geek” with a passion for maps and the intricate pathways of global communication, brings a wealth of experience from the traditional telecom industry.

His journey began with Global Crossing, a pioneer in laying the foundational subsea fiber optic cables that form the backbone of today’s internet.

This early exposure provided him with invaluable insights into the massive financial investments and operational complexities involved in building and maintaining such critical infrastructure.

He witnessed firsthand the challenges of ensuring uptime, managing intricate network failures (like the infamous “shark biting the cable” meme), and the relentless pursuit of lower latency for demanding clients.

His entrepreneurial spirit led him to found Neutrona Networks, a company built atop this foundational infrastructure.

Neutrona developed a sophisticated software-defined networking (SDN) platform tailored for high-performance wide-area networks.

Their clientele included titans of the financial world like Jump Trading, Reuters, and Bloomberg—organizations where every millisecond translates into millions of dollars.

These clients demanded absolute precision: knowing the exact circuit their traffic traversed, its precise latency, and immediate rerouting capabilities in case of an outage.

This experience instilled in Mateo a profound understanding of what the most demanding users require from a network: not just speed, but predictability, reliability, and granular control.

He learned that for these users, a network outage wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a signal for their algorithms to switch to secondary paths, highlighting the critical need for immediate and intelligent traffic management.

After selling Neutrona, Mateo found himself in a unique position, prohibited from working in telecommunications for three years due to the acquisition.

This unexpected hiatus led him into the world of cybersecurity, a field that, as he explains, underwent a “cyber pandemic” during the COVID-19 era.

This period provided him with crucial knowledge in protecting networks, contributors, and users—an expertise that is now foundational to DoubleZero’s security architecture.

In parallel, he continued to push the boundaries of physics, working as a contractor for an HFT firm, building low-latency shortwave networks that literally shot packets around the world through the ionosphere.

This relentless pursuit of speed and efficiency, combined with a deep understanding of network security, laid the groundwork for his return to the telecom space with a revolutionary idea.

Austin Federa: From Solana’s Highs to DoubleZero’s Horizon

Austin Federa’s path to DoubleZero is equally compelling, marked by his pivotal role at Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation, where he spent four years running strategy.

He navigated Solana through its meteoric rise in 2021 and the subsequent challenging market downturns of 2022 and 2023.

This experience provided him with an intimate understanding of the unique demands and inherent limitations of high-performance blockchain networks.

He witnessed the constant struggle to scale, the compromises made to achieve decentralization, and the fundamental challenge of maintaining speed on the public internet.

Austin often recalls a persistent analogy from his time at Solana, particularly from discussions with Firedancer engineers like Kevin Bowers: the “Ferrari stuck in Chicago traffic.”

This analogy perfectly illustrates the dilemma of building highly optimized validator clients (like Firedancer) only to have their potential throttled by the underlying public internet’s limitations.

Solana, despite its impressive transaction speeds, still grappled with the unpredictable latency and congestion of the global internet.

Austin observed how the Solana team, and indeed many Layer 2 solutions, resorted to various “tricks” — like state committees or rotating node counts — to circumvent the internet’s inherent slowness, rather than fundamentally solving the problem.

From an ideological standpoint, Austin was reluctant for Solana to continue down this path of compromise.

He believed in a future where the best ideas in network architecture could flourish without being constrained by the limitations of existing infrastructure.

His time at Bison Trails, a premier crypto infrastructure company acquired by Coinbase Cloud, further solidified his understanding of the operational complexities and infrastructure needs of the crypto ecosystem.

This, combined with his experience at Republic Crypto during the initial ICO boom, gave him a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities in building robust, scalable, and decentralized systems.

The Genesis of DoubleZero: A Convergence of Vision

The idea for DoubleZero, began to crystallize for Mateo as early as 2016, fueled by his observation of crypto’s “shitshow for networking.”

He recognized the immense complexity of moving packets across a global, meshed network with constantly shifting traffic flows — a nightmare for traditional networking, but a fascinating challenge for a network geek.

His frustration during his telecom hiatus, coupled with his deep dive into cybersecurity and high-speed physics, only intensified his desire to tackle this problem.

The true genesis of DoubleZero, however, came through a serendipitous reconnection with Jump Trading.

Jump Crypto, a leading force in high-frequency trading within the crypto space, had developed groundbreaking technology: code that runs on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).

These FPGAs, unlike traditional CPUs, can be reconfigured at the gate level, allowing for unparalleled customization and efficiency in handling specific, high-throughput tasks like packet filtering and signature verification — critical for blockchain operations.

This technology, soon to be open-sourced, became the core intellectual property (IP) that Jump Crypto contributed to the nascent DoubleZero project.

Mateo, Austin, and Andrew (the third co-founder) then embarked on the ambitious journey of building a full-fledged crypto project around this revolutionary FPGA technology.

Their goal was to solve a fundamental “coordination problem” in networking.

While private fiber networks have long existed for large corporations, enabling them to run high-performance distributed systems, the challenge lay in enabling multiple independent parties to operate on such a network seamlessly and securely.

This is where the “magic” of DoubleZero comes in: it allows these disparate networks to appear as one homogeneous system, while maintaining the checks and balances inherent in a blockchain protocol.

If one participant’s links misbehave, the protocol can fall back on others and even “slash” (penalize) the offending party.

This is the true “unlock” that tokens provide — an incentive structure that makes such a decentralized, high-performance network possible, a feat that would be impossible without the alignment power of token economics.

For Mateo, this venture is the culmination of a long-held dream, allowing him to be his authentic self while tackling one of the most complex networking challenges of our time.

For Austin, it was an opportunity to apply his deep understanding of blockchain’s scaling challenges to a solution that could fundamentally advance the entire crypto space, rather than just a single protocol.

Together, they are not just building a network; they are building a new paradigm for how the internet can function, one that is faster, more resilient, and truly decentralized.

Unlocking Efficiency: How DoubleZero Fixes the Internet’s Flaws

The internet, for all its marvels, is a product of its time — a decentralized network designed for resilience, not necessarily for optimal performance or speed.

Its foundational protocols, while robust, often lead to inherent inefficiencies that become glaringly obvious in the context of high-demand applications like blockchain and high-frequency trading.

DoubleZero aims to rectify these shortcomings, offering a vision of an internet that is not only faster but also more intelligent and responsive.

The Internet’s Achilles’ Heel: Inefficient Routing

At the heart of the internet’s routing lies the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

BGP is designed to find a path for data packets, not necessarily the fastest path.

It prioritizes stability and reachability over latency, meaning that traffic can often take circuitous routes, adding unnecessary delays.

This is particularly problematic for applications where every millisecond counts.

As Mateo eloquently puts it, the internet “has no incentive to restore that traffic on the fastest path.”

When a primary route goes down, BGP will find an alternative, but that alternative might be significantly longer and less efficient, simply because it exists and is reachable.

A compelling real-world example of this inefficiency is the Tokyo cable cut incident that Austin recounted.

When a subsea cable near Tokyo went down for scheduled maintenance, validators in the region suddenly experienced significant performance degradation.

The internet, true to its design, routed around the problem, but it did so by sending traffic the “long way.”

This meant that data was taking a much less optimal path, leading to increased latency and impacting the performance of critical blockchain operations.

What’s more, this was a scheduled maintenance, yet the internet’s routing mechanisms didn’t account for optimizing around it.

This highlights a fundamental flaw: the internet’s routing is often reactive and suboptimal, especially in the face of congestion, maintenance, or cable cuts — events that, as Mateo points out, “happen all the time.”

DoubleZero’s Solution: Intelligent, Low-Latency Routing

DoubleZero tackles these inefficiencies head-on by implementing a sophisticated software-defined networking (SDN) approach.

Unlike the public internet, which operates on a best-effort basis, DoubleZero is designed to ensure that traffic always takes the lowest latency path.

This is achieved through a centralized, yet decentralized, control plane that can dynamically route traffic based on real-time network conditions.

The core innovation lies in DoubleZero operating under a single Autonomous System Number (ASN) (their mainnet ASN is 209321).

This allows them to overlay a unified, high-performance network on top of disparate physical networks.

While traditional private networks achieve low latency by being centrally controlled and purpose-built, DoubleZero extends this concept to a decentralized environment.

Their software system runs a single controller over all contributing individual networks, ensuring that traffic is routed efficiently and always on the fastest available path.

This is a significant departure from the public internet, where each ASN makes independent routing decisions, often leading to suboptimal global paths.

The Decentralization Challenge: Democratizing Performance

The challenge, then, is how to democratize access to such high-performance networks.

Historically, the kind of low-latency, high-throughput infrastructure that DoubleZero is building has been the exclusive domain of large corporations and financial institutions, requiring massive capital expenditures.

DoubleZero aims to make this accessible to everyone, and decentralization is key to this vision.

Tokenization plays a crucial role in this democratization.

As Austin emphasized, tokens are the “real unlock” here, providing the alignment power and incentive structure necessary to coordinate multiple independent parties to contribute to and utilize the network.

This allows DoubleZero to overcome the coordination problem that has historically prevented the widespread adoption of such high-performance, multi-party networks.

The project is also committed to progressively decentralizing its core components.

While their initial deployment, Mainnet Beta, will be partially decentralized, the roadmap includes a continuous push towards full decentralization of the network controller and the agents that deploy configurations to switches.

This iterative approach ensures that the network can deliver high performance from day one while gradually transitioning to a fully decentralized and community-governed model.

By combining cutting-edge networking technology with the power of blockchain-based incentives, DoubleZero is not just fixing the internet; it’s reinventing it for a decentralized future.

Solana First: Proving the Concept in the Toughest Arena

Every ambitious project needs a proving ground, a crucible where its core tenets can be tested against the most formidable challenges.

For DoubleZero, that proving ground is Solana.

The decision to focus initially on Solana is not arbitrary; it’s a strategic choice rooted in a deep understanding of the blockchain landscape and a commitment to tackling the “hardest nut to crack” first.

Why Solana? The Ultimate Stress Test

Austin Federa articulates several compelling reasons for choosing Solana as DoubleZero’s initial focus:

Familiarity and Expertise:

Both Mateo and Austin, along with the DoubleZero team, possess extensive knowledge of Solana’s architecture and its unique demands.

This includes a significant technical overlap with the Firedancer team and Jump Crypto, key players in the Solana ecosystem.

The Hardest Nut to Crack:

Solana is arguably the most demanding blockchain network in terms of raw performance.

When considering the ratio of transactions per second to node count, Solana stands in a league of its own.

With thousands of transactions per second and over a thousand validators, it generates an immense volume of data that needs to be moved around efficiently.

This creates a “giant turbine tree of state propagation,” with transactions flying from diverse sources, including a substantial chunk from Helius.

For DoubleZero, supporting Solana is akin to doing the hardest thing first, ensuring that if their solution can excel here, it can excel anywhere.

Meaningful Revenue for Validators:

Solana possesses a crucial characteristic that makes it an ideal partner: it has meaningful revenue streams for validators that are not solely inflationary.

This is a significant differentiator, as it creates a dynamic where validators are incentivized and willing to pay for higher-performance connections.

This willingness stems from the potential to access types of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) that would otherwise be unprofitable, leading to enhanced MEV rewards.

Benefits for Validators: More Money, More Capacity

DoubleZero’s ultimate goal, from a validator’s perspective, is simple: to help them make more money.

The success of DoubleZero is intrinsically linked to the financial success of its validators.

This increased profitability can manifest in several ways:

Increased Block Rewards:

By enabling more transactions to fit into a block, DoubleZero can directly contribute to higher block rewards for validators.

Enhanced MEV Opportunities:

The predictable, low-latency network provided by DoubleZero unlocks new MEV opportunities.

Traders can execute strategies that were previously too risky or impossible on the public internet due to unpredictable latency.

For instance, a trader with a predictive model might hesitate to send a trade if the network latency is variable, as their trade might land after their market prediction is no longer valid.

DoubleZero eliminates this variability, making such trades viable and profitable.

Pushing Protocol Limits:

With a more robust and capable underlying network, developers at Anza and Firedancer can push Solana’s protocol limits higher and more quickly.

This could mean a significant increase in computational units (CUs) or a reduction in block times, further enhancing Solana’s overall performance.

The Predictable Network: Eliminating Latency Variability

One of the most profound impacts of DoubleZero is its ability to transform an unpredictable network into a predictable one.

On the public internet, latency is a variable beast.

A transaction might take 280 milliseconds one moment and 350 milliseconds the next, making precise timing for trading strategies a gamble.

This unpredictability is exacerbated by real-world events like cable cuts or scheduled maintenance, which can force traffic onto suboptimal, longer routes.

Mateo’s example of the Tokyo cable cut vividly illustrates this.

When that cable went down, the internet routed traffic the “long way” because BGP has no incentive to find the second fastest path.

In contrast, a high-performance network like DoubleZero would immediately reroute traffic onto the next fastest cable, which is often lying right beside the first one in the ocean.

This ensures consistent, low-latency performance, even in the face of network disruptions.

By providing a network where latency is a known and consistent factor, DoubleZero enables a new class of trading strategies and significantly reduces the risk associated with high-speed operations.

This predictability is a game-changer, not just for validators seeking to maximize their returns, but for the entire Solana ecosystem, paving the way for even more sophisticated and high-throughput applications.

Beyond Blockchain: A Multi-Tenant Network for the Future

While DoubleZero is making its initial foray into the demanding world of blockchain, particularly with Solana, its long-term vision extends far beyond.

The project is not merely building a specialized network for crypto; it is laying the groundwork for a multi-tenant, high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting a vast array of decentralized applications and future innovations.

Initial Focus: The Early Adopters of Speed

The decision to start with trading and crypto is a pragmatic one.

As Austin points out, these sectors represent a massive market from a monetary perspective, and critically, they are the “customer of first adoption of new technology.”

Industries where speed and low latency directly translate into significant financial gains are inherently willing to pay a premium for cutting-edge solutions.

This allows DoubleZero to establish a strong foothold and prove its value in the most demanding environments before expanding to broader use cases.

Expanding Horizons: Beyond the Blockchain

The capabilities of DoubleZero are not confined to blockchain alone.

The underlying technology—a high-performance, low-latency network—is fundamentally versatile.

The team is already exploring and implementing its use in other critical areas:

Decentralized Storage:

DoubleZero has teamed up with Shelby, a group working with Jump, to build a new decentralized storage network.

In this application, DoubleZero serves as the backhaul technology, syncing storage nodes, running data checksums, and ensuring rapid data availability.

While typical CDN delivery might still leverage the public internet, the core, high-integrity data operations benefit immensely from DoubleZero’s infrastructure.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):

The principles of efficient data distribution and low latency are directly applicable to CDNs.

As Mateo highlights, companies like Meta (Facebook) invest heavily in subsea fiber not out of altruism, but to ensure their content, like Instagram Reels, loads instantly.

This is a prime example of how high-performance networking directly impacts user experience and business models.

DoubleZero can provide the foundational layer for next-generation, decentralized CDNs, ensuring faster and more reliable content delivery globally

AI Models:

The burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, particularly with large language models and complex computational tasks, requires immense data throughput and low-latency communication between distributed computing resources.

DoubleZero’s network can provide the necessary backbone for efficient training, inference, and deployment of AI models, enabling faster iteration and more powerful applications.

General Content Distribution:

Beyond specific applications, DoubleZero envisions itself as a foundational layer for any form of content distribution that demands high performance and reliability.

This could range from streaming services to real-time collaborative platforms, where the current internet’s limitations often lead to buffering, lag, and a degraded user experience.

Non-Prescriptive Infrastructure: Building for the Unknown

Mateo emphasizes that DoubleZero is building a “multi-tenant purpose-built network.”

This means it’s designed for specific high-performance needs, but with the flexibility to accommodate diverse applications.

He draws an analogy to an ice cream shop: it’s purpose-built for ice cream lovers, but offers many “flavors” (use cases) to satisfy different preferences.

This philosophy echoes Solana’s approach to infrastructure: build high-performance, non-prescriptive infrastructure, rather than trying to dictate specific use cases.

The team recognizes that the most impactful applications of their technology might not even exist yet.

By focusing on creating a robust, high-performance foundation, they are betting that future innovators will leverage DoubleZero to build amazing things that are currently unimaginable on the existing internet.

This forward-thinking approach ensures that DoubleZero remains relevant and adaptable, ready to power the next wave of digital innovation, whatever form it may take.

It’s about creating the pipes and plumbing for a future internet that is inherently faster, more reliable, and truly capable of supporting the decentralized, high-throughput demands of tomorrow’s applications.

The Economics of Decentralized Performance: DoubleZero’s Business Model

The vision of a faster, more efficient internet is compelling, but for DoubleZero to truly revolutionize the digital landscape, it must also be economically viable and sustainable.

The project addresses a fundamental challenge: how to democratize access to high-performance networking, which has historically been prohibitively expensive and centralized.

DoubleZero’s business model is designed to overcome the massive capital expenditure (capex) typically associated with building and maintaining private, low-latency networks, making it accessible to a broader range of users and applications.

Democratizing High-Performance: Overcoming Capex Barriers

Traditional high-performance networks, like those used by high-frequency trading firms, require enormous upfront investments in infrastructure—tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for global fiber networks.

This significant capex creates a barrier to entry, limiting such capabilities to a select few.

DoubleZero aims to dismantle this barrier by transforming a centralized, capital-intensive business model into a decentralized, accessible one.

Their approach leverages a shared infrastructure model, where the immense cost of building and maintaining a global, low-latency network is distributed among many participants.

This is where the power of tokenization and the decentralized nature of the DoubleZero protocol come into play.

By incentivizing contributions and participation through a token-based economic model, DoubleZero can aggregate resources and create a network that would be financially unfeasible for most individual entities to build on their own.

Frictionless Access and Low Marginal Cost

One of the key innovations of DoubleZero’s economic model is its emphasis on frictionless access.

Users can immediately access the network’s high-performance bandwidth without the lengthy contracts, complex negotiations, and significant upfront payments typically associated with traditional telecom services.

This on-demand model is crucial for the fast-paced, dynamic environment of decentralized applications and trading, where the ability to scale up or down quickly is paramount.

The shared model also results in a very low marginal cost for users.

Once the foundational infrastructure is in place, the cost of transmitting additional data becomes significantly lower.

This contrasts sharply with traditional models where bandwidth can be expensive and inflexible.

By eliminating the need for individual users to incur massive capex, DoubleZero offers a cost-effective solution for high-performance networking.

It’s akin to a utility model, where users pay for what they consume, but the underlying infrastructure is collectively owned and maintained, leading to efficiencies of scale.

Sustainability and Value Proposition

The sustainability of DoubleZero’s business model hinges on its ability to provide tangible value to its participants.

For validators and other network contributors, the value comes from increased profitability through enhanced MEV opportunities and improved network performance.

For users, the value lies in access to a faster, more reliable, and more predictable internet, enabling new applications and strategies that are not possible on the public internet.

The token economics are designed to align incentives, ensuring that all participants—from network contributors to users—benefit from the growth and efficiency of the network.

This creates a virtuous cycle: as more users join and demand for high-performance bandwidth increases, the value of the network grows, further incentivizing contributions and investments in its expansion and improvement.

DoubleZero is not just selling bandwidth; it’s selling a fundamental upgrade to the internet’s capabilities, delivered through a financially innovative and decentralized framework.

Lessons from the Trenches: Founder Insights

Beyond the technical innovations and ambitious vision, DoubleZero is also a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit and the lessons learned from years in the trenches of building and scaling companies.

Mateo Ward and Austin Federa, with their distinct yet complementary experiences, offer invaluable insights into the challenges and rewards of founding a startup, particularly in the dynamic and often chaotic world of crypto.

Mateo Ward: The Repeat Founder’s Wisdom

Mateo, a seasoned entrepreneur on his fourth startup, describes the experience as “eating glass and staring into the abyss” — a vivid metaphor for the inherent difficulties and uncertainties of the journey.

Yet, he approaches it with a newfound sense of self and authenticity.

His key takeaways for aspiring founders include:

Managing Stress and Embracing Authenticity:

While the pressure remains intense, Mateo emphasizes the importance of managing stress and allowing things to unfold.

He finds joy in simply “being myself,” a luxury often denied to first-time founders who feel compelled to play a role or project a polished image for investors.

World-Class Quality from Day One:

A core philosophy for Mateo is building with “world-class quality.”

While acknowledging Austin’s adage that “if you’re proud of it, you ship too slow” (meaning perfection isn’t the goal), he insists that the foundation must be built to last.

This commitment to quality extends to every aspect of the business, from product development to team building.

Recruiting World-Class Talent:

Perhaps his most significant learning is the critical importance of bringing “world-class people onto your team.”

He cautions against the temptation to hire substandard individuals with the hope of coaching them to excellence.

Instead, he advocates for actively seeking out the best, even if it means bringing them on as partners.

The crypto space, he notes, uniquely facilitates this partnership model, allowing DoubleZero to attract top engineers from companies like AWS, HFT firms, and aerospace, by offering them a share in the upside.

Austin Federa: The First-Time Founder’s Perspective

For Austin, DoubleZero marks his first venture as a founder, a role he didn’t necessarily envision for himself even a few years ago.

His insights offer a different, yet equally profound, perspective:

Conviction is Key:

Austin stresses that the idea for a startup must be one that “captures you,” keeping you up at night and drawing you back to it repeatedly.

He observes that founders who pursue ventures for aesthetic, lifestyle, or social reasons, rather than genuine conviction in the idea itself, often fail.

Founding a company is inherently hard and risky, and without deep conviction, the motivation will inevitably wane.

Learning from Experience:

Austin credits his four years working with Raj and Anatoly at Solana as an unparalleled “master class” in launching and scaling a project.

He witnessed firsthand what worked well and what could have been done better, navigating Solana from an unknown entity to a major player, even through the tumultuous collapse of FTX.

This experience provided him with a “formula and a playbook” for success, albeit one that requires constant adaptation.

The Value of Growth-Stage Experience:

Contrary to the popular narrative of young, first-time founders, Austin advises aspiring entrepreneurs to first gain experience at a “growth-stage startup that is kicking ass.”

He suggests taking a small salary if necessary, to spend those formative years learning how to run a company from the inside.

This practical experience, he argues, is far more valuable than jumping into founding without a solid operational foundation.

The Art of Communication: Building Trust in Web3

Austin Federa, with his background as Solana’s head of communications, offers a critical perspective on the art of communication in the Web3 space.

His insights are particularly relevant in an industry often plagued by hype, misinformation, and a lack of transparency.

Brand Building: A Long Game:

Austin emphasizes that “a brand takes years to build and minutes to destroy.”

This underscores the importance of consistent, truthful communication.

Networks that have earned a reputation for honesty and reliability are trusted by their communities, while those that engage in deceptive practices quickly lose credibility.

The goal of communication should never be transactional or manipulative; it should be about building long-term value and trust.

Honesty and Transparency Over Gaslighting:

In a direct critique of some Web2 marketing tactics, Austin asserts that “you can’t get away with gaslighting people” in Web3, especially not during a bear market.

While a bull market might temporarily mask such practices, the crypto community is highly discerning.

He advocates for simplifying the message without sacrificing details, citing Anatoly Yakovenko’s ability to convey the spirit of Solana’s technical workings without getting bogged down in minutiae.

This approach fosters genuine understanding and trust, contrasting sharply with the opaque, marketing-speak often found in traditional tech.

Negative Marketing: A Self-Defeating Strategy:

Austin strongly advises against negative marketing, where projects attempt to elevate themselves by tearing down competitors.

He uses the analogy of an airline not boasting about its safety record after a competitor’s crash.

Such tactics, especially in areas like security or safety, undermine trust in the entire industry rather than elevating a single brand.

The collapses of Terra and FTX serve as stark reminders: these events didn’t lead users to flock to alternative algorithmic stablecoins or centralized exchanges; they eroded confidence in the entire crypto space.

In a rapidly growing industry, collaboration and mutual elevation are far more effective than destructive competition.

The Road Ahead for DoubleZero: A New Era of Connectivity

DoubleZero stands at the vanguard of a new era in internet infrastructure.

By meticulously addressing the inherent inefficiencies and centralized bottlenecks of the current internet, Mateo Ward and Austin Federa are not merely optimizing existing systems; they are fundamentally reimagining how global connectivity can operate.

Their audacious vision, grounded in decades of combined experience in telecommunications and blockchain, promises a future where the internet is not just faster, but also fairer, more resilient, and truly decentralized.

From tackling the “Ferrari stuck in traffic” problem to democratizing access to high-performance networks, DoubleZero is building the foundational layers for a digital world where speed, predictability, and decentralization are not mutually exclusive.

Their strategic focus on Solana, the most demanding blockchain, serves as a powerful testament to their commitment to proving their technology in the most challenging environments, while simultaneously delivering tangible benefits to validators and users alike.

The journey of DoubleZero extends far beyond the confines of blockchain.

Their multi-tenant network is poised to revolutionize diverse sectors, from decentralized storage and content delivery to the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.

By building a non-prescriptive, high-performance infrastructure, they are empowering innovators to create applications and services that are currently constrained by the limitations of the public internet.

The economic model underpinning DoubleZero is equally transformative, breaking down the prohibitive capital barriers that have historically restricted access to elite networking capabilities.

Through tokenization and a shared infrastructure approach, they are creating a financially sustainable ecosystem where the benefits of high-performance connectivity are accessible to a broad spectrum of participants, fostering a virtuous cycle of growth and innovation.

As Mateo and Austin have shared, the path of a founder is fraught with challenges, demanding unwavering conviction, world-class execution, and authentic leadership.

Their insights into managing stress, building with quality, recruiting top talent, and communicating with integrity offer a valuable playbook for anyone navigating the complexities of the Web3 landscape.

Their emphasis on honesty, transparency, and a collaborative spirit underscores a commitment not just to their project, but to the collective advancement of the entire industry.

DoubleZero is more than just a technological endeavor; it is a philosophical statement about the future of the internet.

It is a bold step towards an open, efficient, and equitable digital commons, where the promise of decentralized innovation can finally be fully realized.

The road ahead is undoubtedly challenging, but with the vision, expertise, and unwavering commitment of the Double Zero team, the future of the internet looks brighter, and significantly faster.

Learn More

To dive deeper and explore their groundbreaking work, visit any or all of their respective resources below:

X Profile

• Mert Mumtaz
• Austin Federa
• DoubleZero
• Mateo Ward
• Andrew McConnell
• Malbec Labs
• Raj Gokal
• Anatoly Yakovenko
• Solana
• Solana Foundation
• Firedancer
• Jump Crypto
• Anza
• Shelby

Website

• Helius
• DoubleZero
• Malbec Labs
• Solana
• Solana Foundation
• Firedancer
• Jump Crypto
• Anza
• Shelby

Youtube

• Accelerate with Mert

IBRL and Onwards !!!