Austin Federa Departs Solana Foundation to Reinvent the Internet

After a four-year stint as the Solana Foundation’s Head of Strategy, Austin Federa sets out to build the world’s first N1.

Finn Miller

Published: Dec 6, 2024 at 15:56

Austin Federa, former Solana Foundation Head of Strategy, has stepped away from his post with an ambitious new vision.

Taking ‘Improve Bandwidth, Reduce Latency’ to new levels, Federa and co-founders Andrew McConnell and Mateo Ward have announced DoubleZero, the world’s first ‘N1’.

What exactly is an ‘N1', and how does DoubleZero intend to make the entire internet faster?

What is DoubleZero?

Not to be confused with a new blockchain, DoubleZero provides a neutral base layer infrastructure for decentralized systems. Designed to facilitate faster communication, DoubleZero aims to eradicate limitations caused by bandwidth bottlenecks and variable latency.

In its mission to scale the web, DoubleZero provides blockchains with two key improvements over traditional internet infrastructure and is designed across two layers.

doublezero

Leveraging specialized hardware, the outer layer filters inbound transactions to remove spam and duplicates before they can be needlessly transmitted across the network, preventing bloat and unnecessary congestion. In theory, this feature empowers blockchains to share system-wide filtration resources rather than forcing that load on individual validators.

Meanwhile, DoubleZero’s inner layer enhances network efficiency by tracking, routing, and prioritizing outbound messages. This allows validators to control latency and eliminate random variations, helping them to reach consensus faster.

DoubleZero aims to create a new "base layer" for the internet, optimized for high-performance distributed applications. This can foster innovation by removing the communication bottlenecks that hinder current systems.

Crypto Community Rallies Behind Promise of Faster Internet

DoubleZero argues that one of the biggest obstacles to improving the scalability of distributed systems lies in the fact that the underlying infrastructure, the public internet, hasn’t improved since the birth of the industry itself.

“The physical network layer that blockchains use has not changed since the advent of Bitcoin. This underdevelopment limits the scalability and decentralization of performant blockchains, making them both more centralized and more inefficient.” - DoubleZero WhitePaper

Federa’s new project aims to resolve this overarching constraint, optimizing not just Solana, but every decentralized network across the industry. For that reason, DoubleZero has been lauded across the industry, with dozens of experts eagerly awaiting its impact.

Meanwhile, Solana community members remarked that DoubleZero exemplified the network’s obsession with performance, joking that the ex-Solana Foundation team decided to take Solana to the next level and rebuild a faster internet.

Is the Solana Foundation Dissolving?

Federa’s departure from the Solana Foundation continues an emerging trend of key figures within the organization leaving to launch their own projects. Like Federa, former Solana Foundation Engineer Chase Barker announced he would be leaving the Foundation to pursue new goals.

While executive employees leaving the Foundation could be considered bearish for the ecosystem, the Solana community has celebrated these developments, remarking that Solana’s builder culture is reminiscent of PayPal.

Solana co-founder Raj Gokal also declared his full support for Foundation members starting their own projects, arguing “this is the best possible outcome”.

Some of Solana’s biggest names have actively championed sunsetting the Foundation entirely. At Solana Breakpoint 2024, Solana Foundation Executive Director Dan Albert argued that the eventual dissolution of the Foundation was the organization’s end goal.