DoubleZero, the crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is preparing a major network update aimed at spreading Solana validator activity more evenly across the world. On March 9, the company will begin Phase II of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, shifting 2.4 million SOL from a 13 million SOL pool to validators in underrepresented locations including São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each region can receive as much as 600,000 SOL in added delegated stake incentives.
DoubleZero operates a dedicated high-speed internet network designed to help Solana machines communicate faster and with greater reliability. In 2025, the company behind that network raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation.
Validator concentration in Europe has created a distance gap
Federa said one of the main issues is geographic concentration. As blockchains become faster, operators have stronger incentives to place infrastructure close together. He compared that pattern to the early high-frequency trading race on Wall Street, when firms tried to place servers as near as possible to the New York Stock Exchange to cut milliseconds from execution times.
A large share of Solana’s staked tokens, which help secure the network, is now located in Central Europe. Federa attributed that to a mix of history and economics. Europe had strong and relatively cheap bare-metal data centers, and Solana was optimized early for that type of hosting environment, which encouraged infrastructure to cluster there.
That concentration comes with trade-offs. If most validators sit in Europe, users in more distant regions may be disadvantaged. Federa said a trader in South America might send an order first, yet a machine in Germany could still win the trade. The 2.4 million SOL incentive program is intended to reduce that imbalance by making it more economical for validators to operate outside the established hubs.
Private fiber network and multicast are meant to cut repeated data traffic
According to Federa, the biggest obstacle to expansion into those regions is not technical but economic. The farther a node is from the traditional centers, the longer data takes to arrive, which creates a practical disadvantage for operators. DoubleZero says its private fiber network can improve connectivity, while the new delegation incentives are meant to offset the cost of being outside the main clusters.
Alongside the geographic push, DoubleZero is also introducing multicast functionality to Solana. Federa compared the concept to watching the Super Bowl by satellite instead of through an online stream. A satellite signal can be received by countless viewers without requiring a separate transmission for each one. Streaming usually sends distinct data flows to each viewer.
He argued that many blockchain networks still function more like streaming systems, sending the same data over and over again. Multicast changes that model. If data needs to reach 1,000 nodes, the sender does not need to deliver 1,000 separate copies; the network hardware can replicate the data closer to its destination.
That structure lowers bandwidth costs, makes data delivery more even across participants, and leaves more room for future upgrades. DoubleZero also says it makes blockchain infrastructure behave more like traditional exchanges, where multicast is already widely used.