Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and director of the DoubleZero Foundation. Welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. You are doing something quite exciting. We don't see a lot of a, we see a lot of copy pasta in crypto and you're doing something very, very exciting. We definitely want to get into it, but I think we want to start out with kind of like how you got into crypto and then kind of like what led you to become an entrepreneur and build DoubleZero. So tell us, yeah. you go back far enough. My first experience with crypto was buying some bitcoin in, gosh, probably like 2014 and promptly losing the keys when it went down to basically being worthless. And it was fine, but bitcoin is one of those things that for me, it didn't really capture my attention in the early days. This was back when it was like bunker coin. And for me, the idea of like, we're gonna have World War III, but don't worry, you're gonna be in your bunker and you're gonna have Bitcoin and it's somehow gonna be valuable. like, I'm like a broke student being like, I'm not gonna have a bunker if World War III hits. I'm gonna be in Boston and probably nuked. Like, this is very uninteresting to me. And so, it took me a while to really sort of like get back into the space after that. It took actually in like mid 2017, I was working for a fintech company in New York. and they were sort of in the process of rapidly failing. And one of the last things they tried to do to sort of save themselves was pivot to building a borrow lend token on Ethereum, which two years later we would have called DeFi, but at the time there wasn't really a name for what this thing was. But I was like, it's smart contracts, whatever. We have lawyers for contracts. Smart contracts aren't that interesting, but suddenly if you learn something for work, you sit down and you go, oh, Crypto's just terrible at naming things. These are just programs. Why are we calling them smart contracts? These are just on-chain programs that are trustless and verifiable by anyone, can be executed by anyone anywhere in the world. This is actually pretty interesting. So the company promptly failed and the pivot didn't work, all those sorts of things. The thing never launched. But I kind of got that thing stuck in my head. I caught the crypto bug there as like, so this use case, maybe not. But there's definitely stuff you can build using smart contracts that seem valuable and interesting. So fast forward from there, I took a job at Republic running marketing for Republic and Republic Crypto, helped them launch the Republic Crypto brand and kind of go out to market with all of that. And it was there until I ended up joining Bison Trails, which was a blockchain infrastructure company that got acquired by Coinbase in the end of 2020. And so at Bison Trails, I was working on sort of the product and platform team. was running product marketing for the organization. And just the move to Coinbase didn't feel like the right thing for me or for the company and so at that point I started interviewing with a bunch of different layer ones and layer two is kind of all the hot names of the day the graph polka dot polygon you know all these types of like folks and then a guy used to work with at Republic was like hey you should had recently joined Solana from multi coin he'd been like just a know, associate at MultiCoin and when they did the investment in Solana, he went on and worked for Solana Labs and was like, hey, should, you should talk to Raj and Toli. And I was like, I don't know, like I've worked with Bison Trails, we did 40 different protocols. I never talked to anyone at Solana, like what the hell are they even up to? And he was like, just trust me, like these guys are doing some cool stuff, get on a call, you know, all that type of thing. And so I've been working on ETH2 infrastructure back when we called it ETH2. at Bison Trails and we'd been one of the first companies to launch beacon chain support back in those days and ETH 2 staking with the thing we call the bridge but was not a bridge, it was just a one way deposit contract but for some reason everyone called it the bridge contract which was always very funny. I remember getting on a call with Toli and sort of being like, okay, so I've been working on all this ETH 2 stuff, how does DeFi work in a sharded environment? And he sort of just like sits back and laughs, goes, it doesn't work at all. Like you can't establish trust assumptions between state. Like all the problems today, five years later about like why DeFi is not particularly strong on L2s today, at least most L2s, totally was just like, yeah, that'll never work. And so I'd love to say I was super prescient and sort of could see that Solano was gonna be a hundred billion dollar protocol someday. But really what it was is I was just like, when all of the market is going in one direction, you generally want to go work for the dude who's going in the opposite direction. Not because it's going to necessarily be profitable, but you're going to learn a ton. And I was still, you know, like mid-career at that stage. And so it made a ton of sense for me to just be like, look, I don't know if this thing's going to work, but I'm going to learn a ton working for someone who thinks counter to the way the market thinks today. And that was five years ago. I wish I had taken that advice. And I wonder now if you and I cross paths at some point. I was, before Bison Trails was acquired by Coinbase, I had been meeting with Bison Trails. I was at Oasis Labs at the time. And we were working with Bison Trails on some validator thing. And so I wonder if we had been on calls to get, I bet we were. Yeah. yeah, I you're definitely on calls with Victor then, right? Victor Bunyan? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he runs protocol operations for our Coinbase now. Yeah. seems like ages ago, but that was just like five years ago. mean, yeah, it is, guess, in crypto terms, for sure. But I remember in the early days, a friend of mine actually ran a community for Solano, a fellow named Austin also. I don't know if you remember him, but... for maybe two or three months. Yeah. remember he said, Hey, I joined this project called Solana and I'm running a hackathon. I'm like, cool. Cool. Let me check it out. And then he shared with me registration numbers and they were like massive. I thought, what? What's, what's going on over there? And I wish that that initial kind of like, Hey, there's something here. You should pay attention. I should have listened to that voice because, but I didn't. Instead, I stayed in the Ethereum community, which, and I consider myself a member of really, I'm not tribal in any sense, but I ignored a voice I should have listened to then. Yeah, I mean one of the interesting things about crypto is there's a lot of people who label themselves as free thinkers but like kind of follow the herd a lot and you know we like we all kind of dunk on the VCs for sort of the like Like the easiest way to get VCs excited about investing in you is to raise around Like the number of people in the last like two weeks who are like, can we invest is like just like massive? It's like very funny but crypto has this problem of like everyone is very online and there's good parts about that but one of the bad parts about it is people feel like there is real switching cost in changing their mind. And it's hard and I think we dunk on a lot of people for sort of rethinking positions they used to hold or something along those lines and whether it's in politics or whatever it's like oh well like Trump said this thing in 2016 but now he's doing this or you know Democrats said this thing in 2020 but now it's 2024 and they're saying the opposite it's like. Yeah man, like we should reward people for changing their mind and being willing to admit when they make mistakes or just being willing to say like, look like there's something interesting happening over here. I want to go see what this thing is. Yeah, no, I fully agree. Well, let's jump into DoubleZero. You recently raised a round for DoubleZero and I, there's a lot of press on that. So don't want to spend a ton of time on that, but I do want to spend a lot of time on what is this thing that you are now building with your team. And let's start out with like, what's the problem that you saw that led you to, by the way, we also, you were at the Solana foundation. And so you left the Solana foundation to start DoubleZero. And so. to do something like that where you were probably in a pretty comfortable position to now you're like in the fire of being entrepreneur. Like, like, why would you do that? Like there's so Yeah, I mean, will say like, Solana Foundation is a great place to work. There's a ton of really cool work being done there. It's an exceptional collection of people and the pay is quite good as well, right? Just like if we're being honest, like working for a foundation is generally a pretty great job if you can get it. Not just from a compensation standpoint, but because you are sort of in this like very privileged position where... you are not like responsible for the ecosystem, but you are helping out throughout a whole series of different things in those ecosystems. In some ways, it's like what everyone thinks VC should be, you know? It's like you are basically deploying help at a giant nonprofit that's pretty well capitalized and having opinions about how things will build, but it's primarily a support organization for the founders and entrepreneurs in those ecosystems. Even the Ethereum Foundation, right? They're doing research, they're funding new initiatives and ideas. it's kind of like the best type of nonprofit you could possibly work for. But yeah, I guess I can start a little bit with sort of that. So at my time at the Solana Labs and then Solana Foundation, one of the main things that I was involved in were some of these new technology initiatives. So whether that was like MetaPlex and Stakepools in the early days or the Fire Dancer program or token extensions and network extensions. It was lot of work on new and emerging technology and figuring out could this be integrated with a blockchain? Does this fit into a place or solve a problem within the salon ecosystem? And one of the big things that I kept coming into was networking, was this global base layer of communications work between validators. So right now, every single blockchain in the world from Bitcoin and Ethereum, which do, seven to 21 things per second, up to like Solana, Sui, Aptos, ICP, know, pick your blockchain. They all communicate exclusively over the public internet. And the public internet is great at what it was built for. It is really good at reach. It is really good at resiliency. You can download a podcast anywhere in the world, you know, at fast on most internet connections. You can be almost anywhere in the world, you can hit play on Netflix, and boom, it'll be loaded on that screen. What the internet is not built for is high-performance applications that are latency dependent. And so we're sort of trying, we've been doing this thing with high-performance blockchains, whether it's centralized L2 sequencers or whether it's L1s that are more decentralized, where we're basically trying to use the wrong technology stack to... run high-performance networks over. it reminds me of there was this period of time when the world was transitioning from steam engines to diesel locomotives, and you just got these insane steam engines people were building that could go 60 miles an hour, and they were these giant coal-belching behemoths. And they were beautiful marvels of engineering, but they were fundamentally not what the future of trains were going to be. And I feel like we're in a very similar place with the internet today where there's a lot of stuff like Solano's turbine the state propagation system for it or Monad's Raptor cast, you know or some of these types of systems. They're really good at Solving the problem of we're using technology from 1990 on the public internet to try and run high-performance distributed systems So like at its core, what is their DoubleZero building? we were building a physical fiber infrastructure network for high performance distributed systems. And so what that means is like physical fiber, dedicated bandwidth run by a network of independent contributors creating basically a parallel internet that is extremely low latency. It's very low jitter. It's high bandwidth, high availability. And that is really designed to accelerate the performance of all of these high performance blockchains. And we're starting with Solana because Solana like has product market fit today? It is a network that is in insane demand. It is a network that has ambitions of reaching a million transactions per second. It has a validator client, two validator clients capable of reaching a million transactions per second, but it doesn't have a global coordination network that allows it to have 2,000 nodes all around the world and also run at a million transactions per second. No, building a physical fiber network sounds so intimidating. what's going on in your mind that you would think, did you just wake up one day and said, okay, here's a problem. I'm the right guy to fix it. And I'm going to build a fiber, a physical fiber network. Like that is crazy. Yeah, so I mean, the idea was kicking around in my head for a year or more. And all of my stopping points were, I don't know anything about building fiber networks. I don't know anything about high frequency trading networks. Like I know enough to be dangerous, but like not enough to actually go do the thing. And then it got connected into two guys who actually in parallel were starting to work on a similar problem. My co-founders, Andrew McConnell and Mateo Ward, who are over on the Malbec Labs team. and they were starting to work on this same exact problem. And so we got connected by actually Kevin Bowers from the Fire Dancer team who said like, I was talking to him about this problem. He was like, you should talk to these guys. They were asking me some questions around this too and seeing if there might be a company in building something like this. And so we got connected sort of middle of last year and you know. But like I would say Andrew spent the last seven years at a high frequency trading firm running their global network operations and building out their high frequency trading infrastructure. Mateo actually has like run and manage like high frequency trading, like basically ISP carriers, like folks building out technologies like shortwave and like fast fiber and those sorts of things. And so neither one of them had really any background in blockchain, but they had like the networking chops and the network credentials to actually like make this thing possible. And so. The three of us kind of came together and we're like, yeah, think there's a project here and there's also a need in the blockchain space to be able to actually run blockchains at 1 million, 2 million, 10 million transactions per second. One of the core theses I have is the ambition of the space is just too small. We're excited about blockchains doing 100,000 transactions per second. Those are like... Those are amateur numbers. We got to look at like 100x-ing most of these networks if we really want to compete with TradFi systems. It certainly is ambitious, but it also I think is pretty aligned with kind of like the Solana ethos of like, you know, just like doing things scared. And I believe it's Toli who's mentioned a couple of times or at least has been attributed to him about, you know, Solana is like the NASDAQ of the blockchain or something like that. It's like, but in order to reach that scale, infrared needs to change. And that's where DoubleZero could come in. Tell us the origin of the name. I know there's a diagram on the website, but maybe you can help us describe what 00 is, where it came from. Yeah, so just building a physical fiber network is awesome. It's a huge like add to it. And just also to be clear, like we're not actually running net new fiber. We're assembling contributions from existing fiber lines. I hope someday we'll have the treasury to run new fiber, but like a cable across the Atlantic can easily be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're not quite there yet. But contributed. to definitely wanted to go over also the the the fiber kind of contribution kind of side of the market, like what that looks like and and incentivizing users to contribute their fiber. We definitely want to get into that. Cool, great. Yeah, but the origin of the name comes from this idea of an inner ring and an outer ring. And these aren't like physical rings. This is more of a logical formation. But you can think about this as one of the main problems that validators have in addition to connectivity is that they simply have a lot of data getting thrown at them all the And so, you there have been moments in Solana's past where it's hit like congestion and the network has ground to very slow. Sometimes it's even gone offline. And that's because these validators are getting flooded with inbound transaction requests. Because there's so much economic activity happening on the network that, you know, people are trying to take advantage of that as they should, right? A systemically organized distributed denial of service attack is also called an NFT mint. if everyone really wants to get into that NFT meant. And so in some ways people are like, was it an attack? Was it like just usage? It doesn't matter if the network has to be able to maintain it in either way. But we're using FPGAs in line with the network actually to do things like signature verification and transaction dedublification. And so this is kind of where the name 00 comes from, these two concentric rings, one of which is the filtration ring and on the inside is sort of this like clean pathway for state transitions and transaction data and all sorts of other things to move through. so 00 was kind of a code name and it ended up just sticking as the project name. I love it. And the diagram is super helpful. Another kind of branding aspect that I really like is the broken emoticon as kind of visual identity. Tell us like the thinking behind that and like what were you trying to convey? Yeah, so this actually sort of happened by accident. in December, I want to say second or third, we were getting ready to launch the white paper and announce the project to the world. we had this landing page, like a nice sort of pretty thing spun up. And we had this white paper. And we sort of realized, we need something for Twitter. You gotta put something in that Twitter box. And I didn't wanna put the image that we had from the home page because that wasn't really our logo. And it was like, what sort of epitomizes everything that we are trying to fix with the internet today? And it was like, you gotta go back to the Netscape Navigator days and the broken JPEG. And if you're trying to load an image on the web, you may have waited five minutes for this web page to load and you want this image of whatever you're supposed to be looking at to load and you get this little broken JPEG icon. And I was just like, I think it was maybe 11 p.m. or something, and I was just like, this feels right. This feels spiritually correct to what this thing is. And so I just threw it up there. And turns out people loved it. It's this kind of nostalgia play, but it also is this symbol of how the internet has all this promise and potential, but we fail to live up to it all the time with the internet. And the broken JPEG was sort of like the epitome of that from the 90s. love it. And so we actually went through like months later and did like a bunch of proper branding exercises with some great designers and stuff. And we ended up just refining the broken JPEG. And so we took this like, you know, sprite from 1994 and basically redid it as vector images and, you know, kind of applied some modern design and modern coloring to it. And that's our logo today. It is a reimagining of the broken JPEG. Not as a hopeful like... arc of where we're trying to get to, but as a reminder of kind of where we've come from and the problems with the modern internet of today. Well, I'll tell you the kind of the mental journey I went on when I, so I went to 00.xyz and then I noticed the broken JPEG, the broken emoticon on the tab. And so I refreshed it thinking that am I at the right place? Maybe if I refresh, a hard refresh, like the image will show up and it didn't. And then I got it. I'm like, that's really cool. So I had that insight of like, okay, I think I know what they're trying to say. And now I know what they're trying to like, then it leads to like a logical conclusion of like, okay, here's kind of the issue. And here's kind of what they're, what they're trying to solve for. And I think that's really cool. Yeah. I'm glad you had that experience, because that's exactly what we were hoping for. I love it. Well, let's talk about the details now of DoubleZero. so kind of all of the stakeholders involved, because you want to build, and maybe if we can move towards this idea of like network effects, because that's essentially what we're trying to get to, is like so much fiber has been contributed and then users using fiber. Well, I'll let you talk. Let's talk about the key stakeholders and how to get to network effects so that 00 becomes really ubiquitous and underpins it really. At some point, probably all chains, but initially Solano. Yeah, so the way we sort of initially conceived of this thing was what if we could build like an underlay network? Everyone's building overlay networks. Like most distributed systems are, well, all distributed systems by definition are overlay networks today. BitTorrent is an overlay network. Ethereum is an overlay network of the public internet. Solana is an overlay network of the public internet. It's these sort of... software-defined logical constructions of data flows and data systems that exist on top of the internet. And if you go back to your computer science 101 days, it's all OSI layer 5, 6, 7. It's very high up in the stack. And so the thinking was basically, if we are going to very seriously look at blockchain scaling, everyone's looking at the software solutions to it. Right? software solutions are awesome. You can do a ton with software solutions. But the mobile revolution was not actually started by software. The mobile software revolution was started by hardware. People forget that there was two years or so of 2G connectivity on iPhones and Android phones. And functionally no one had them. Like yeah, some of the nerds upgraded their BlackBerrys to an iPhone or they got like a new Android phone. for the most part, no one was actually using these things culturally except for business people. And then suddenly 3G came along. And I don't think most people thought we would go from Steve Jobs holding up an iPhone on stage saying it's a breakthrough internet communications device, which is probably one of the best catch-all terms in like, modern computer history and thinking and looking at that thing and being like, this will change dating forever. Right? But that's exactly what happened. Like the iPhone completely revolutionized dating. It kicked off, you know, Tinder and Bumble and all these things today. I don't think people saw social media coming for mobile in such a strong way. And all of these things, they start with the physical infrastructure. And so one of the theses I've had at Solana Foundation for years at this point, is that if all we do, our order of magnitude decreases in costs and increases in capacity, smarter people than us are going to be able to figure out what to build on top of it. Right? Like it was a long stretch to go from the Solana white paper to meme coin mania. Right? That was not the logical conclusion of reading it. You would have assumed, it's going to be a lot of DeFi, we're going to get tokenized stocks, we're going to get tokenized bonds, like... all the proper financial infrastructure is gonna move on to Solana. It's like, well, turns out like a bunch of people want to meme coins. And now we have a bunch of like serious financial infrastructure coming. But this is like that core vision that we have to take into its a complete logical extreme. If we can give developers of protocols entirely new types of tools, they're gonna be able to build things on blockchain and on top of blockchains that were never really. you know, possible to envision sitting from the perspective of the software engineer, you know, today. No, that makes sense. And what enables that is really reducing latency and increasing bandwidth, right? Okay. Or IBRL. Okay. So I'm learning kind of these catchphrases in the Solana ecosystem. So IBRL is increase bandwidth, reduce latency. Tell us more about that. You tweeted that recently. Like, why is that an important pillar in the thing? So it's basically a, you know, a version of this comes from, I think this was probably a tweet maybe like two years ago or three years ago from Anatoly, which it was, I wish I could remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of like, Solana alignment is, does it make the network faster? And does it maintain or increase security? And if the answer is yes, it's Solana aligned, right? There was this one, there's all this hammering about like, what is alignment in Ethereum? Is alt DA still Ethereum? Who knows, right? There's a lot of philosophical questions for a lot of people to debate. But what we know is, if we can increase bandwidth and reduce latency, everything gets better. This is sort of like the old adage of, you can't just throw hardware at the problem, you haven't solved scaling. And that's kind of what we're doing here, is if we're throwing a whole bunch of base layer networking technologies at the problem, which will increase the bandwidth available for everyone and reduce the latency and reduce jitter more importantly than latency honestly on a lot of these links. And so this physical fiber network that like we're know is constructing and lots of individual contributors are coming in and like adding links to the goal of this is that that pathway is going to have a few things. One is fatter pipes so you can push more data per second over those pipes. We're building out a global 100 gigabit Backbone which is faster than most internet that comes into data centers You know available like any validator on the network today The other piece of this is these are dedicated Bandwidth links and so that means it will always take the same amount of time to talk from let's just say New York to Singapore if you're talking over the DoubleZero network if you're running over the public internet if you just you know open terminal on your computer and you ping an IP address in Japan from wherever you are, assuming you're not in Asia, you will see there's a lot of variance in how long that ping time gets back. Go do 50 pings and look. Some of them are going to be 250 milliseconds. Some of them are going to be 500 milliseconds. And that level of variance is really disruptive to high-performance distributed systems because it means that they have to have bigger buffers. They have to wait for data to come in before they can advance. Remember, blockchains have to vote on everything, right? And so you need All that you need to know what the state changes are and what produced those state changes before you can vote on state changes. So, you know, this is kind of there's a lot of really great work done on scaling software and the software layer scaling. And I think that work needs to continue. And there's been a lot of great innovation that's come out of it. But if we don't address the physical underlay network for this, we're going to hit a point where software, either what happens is you see what happens with most new blockchains. Like Solana is the only high performance block chain. with more than a thousand validators. That's surprising, right? Most of these new networks that have great technological merits on their own, they have much smaller validators, that's one-tenth the size that Slana does. And I don't want that to be the future, right? I don't want people to say, well, we can get Slana up to a million transactions per second if we go down to a hundred validators. Or again, like Hyperliquid, right? Hyperliquid's done some very interesting stuff. There's a super solid team there. but it's 11 validators run in Tokyo. And that may be a very good alternative to Binance, right, and centralized exchanges, but at end of the day, that's not the type of distributed systems that I wanna see take over the world. Yeah, you bring up something really interesting in grad school. A lot of the work I did was in queuing theory. And I spent a lot of time in physical supply chains like a Toyota and others in Amazon. And I ended up kind of focusing on what's called the psychology of queuing. And a really interesting thing is most network engineers, they look at latency in terms of average. But what you bring up is actually how humans think of latency. One experience might be 200 milliseconds, and then the next one is 500 milliseconds. Most people don't think of that as like, what's the average latency? Instead, they think, what is the difference? And then they anchor on the difference, and that's what creates user experience. And that's what they remember. They don't remember the average of 200 and 500 milliseconds together, they think, wow, it was like 200 milliseconds, then 500. Like, what was the problem? They think the difference. And that's pretty important, the psychology of queuing. Anyway, that's just kind of an aside, but I think it's pretty important. Let's talk about, OK, so right now there's a DoubleZero, the of the work that you are doing. I believe you mentioned there's a test net currently. Tell us like what's going on there. What are you trying to build out? Yeah, so testnet is basically, a version of testnet right now is up, which is a permissioned testnet. And so we are slowly onboarding slana validators to our testnet. They're able to connect in and start basically communicating over the 00 testnet. And so we have about 20 validators onboarded at this point onto the testnet. And we're going to permissionless testnet probably in about six weeks or so. Mm-hmm. the goal of Testnet is really to sort phase in a bunch of the technologies that we're going to be using on Mainnet. So right now, Testnet, for example, the FPGAs are not doing signature verification or transaction dedupeing at the moment. So we're getting all the GRE tunnels, all the routing protocols to work, everything to stabilize. And I should say also, this is all based on there's a DoubleZero distributed ledger that runs underneath the system. And so This is actually the first network where you're getting an IP address assigned by smart contract. So when you connect into the network, you are running a CLI tool that sits alongside your validator, and you're basically authoring a tunnel connection into the DoubleZero network. And so what's cool about that is a few things. The first is if your validator starts misbehaving and starts spamming the network and doing all this stuff, the network can actually reach consensus and kick you off and say, hey, this is a misbehaving actor. They are. sending a bunch of spam data out to the rest of the network, and the network can protect itself by kicking someone off. But the other cool piece about this is it means there's no central single authority that's approving your request to join the network, which is a really cool system. So Testnet is building out and testing all of that in this private Testnet. We'll then be going into Testnet data, which is where we start having permissionless folks to be able to join. FPGAs will start getting turned on and we'll start testing things like, you how can multicast work on these types of systems? And then we move on to sort of our main net beta, which will be token functionality and permissionless joining and all those sorts of things. And the hardest part of the system in which we're actually building a whole new controller stack to be able to do is permissionless bandwidth contribution. So right now we allow anyone to come in and connect for bandwidth, but it's still a manual onboarding process. So moving that to a permissionless system, everything is easier in software. The minute you have to have like, okay, like two people have to plug in a cable, and if they flip one of the ends of that cable, it's not gonna work, right? So like, the minute you get into the physical world, the number of problems just skyrocket because physicality is variability in a way that software does not. So I would say that our sort of last big hurdle is permissionless bandwidth contribution. and that's probably a 2026 thing, but the rest of the main net should be out this year. So you mentioned validators. they also bandwidth contributors or they're users of the fiber? yeah. So the user side of it consists of validators and RPCs. And so those are the servers that are actually sitting on the 00 network and are connected into it directly. You as a user, you're never connected to 00. If you're trading on Solana, you may be going through an RPC or a validator located on 00. But the same way that you don't know right now, like, oh, are Helios processing my transactions through their Amsterdam facility or through their Toronto facility, you don't really know from a user perspective. It's not like you're paying a helios fee on all your RPC requests directly. And so the customers, for lack of better term, from the network are the RPC providers and the validators. Bandwidth contributors, they can be the folks who run validators, but they're usually folks who actually have network capacity and network inventory. So, you know, Today, that as companies like Jump and Rockaway X and Distributed Global, which are coming on board as network contributors, we have two or three other HFT firms that are coming on board to provide network transit capacity on the network as well. And then we're building out this kind of global 100 gigabit backbone as well. got it. it's in this kind of classic two sided market. You've got bandwidth contributors, and then you've got users of that bandwidth. And that's going to be primarily RPCs and then applications on Solana. OK. And so the validators and RPCs, what they do is they basically pay seat fees to be on the network. And for validators, they pay a percentage of their earnings. RPCs pay in a more traditional per transaction model. And then the bandwidth providers are rewarded for the data that they pass and basically the increment value that they provide to the network. So it uses the Shapley values formula to basically determine if this link, this particular piece of fiber didn't exist. How much worse would the network be? And how much worse would it be relative to the public internet alternative between those locations? And so we have a really nice method where it both rewards resiliency and redundancy, but also rewards links that are being brought into the places where there's the most stake and the most demand from a user perspective. What's the strategy to incentivize? I know you're not there yet, but at some point, how do you incentivize bandwidth providers so that you can hit some level of scale? Yeah, so I mean when the network hits enough economic value passing over it It's just gonna be a good business decision to decide hey We should actually go out and you know provide bandwidth along these these type of connections in the early days the bandwidth providers are doing it in part because they just either run large validators themselves or their they believe in the promise and potential that the token incentives will will bring and so You know, I'm not I'm not here to tell you should sign up and contribute bandwidth for DoubleZero, but those who have decided to do it, they've looked into sort of the math and the formulas. They made a bunch of assumptions about the price of crypto assets in the future and how much value they think the network is going to be able to capture and have decided that it's something they're interested in being early contributors to. got it. And so when you think of like the term network effects, what's like what is what are the state of affairs that need to happen so that when you say when you think of network effects, you can say, it's it's clearly happening right now at DoubleZero. So one of the things that I find fascinating is private networking is an anti-network effect business. So if I'm a high frequency training firm and I get a piece of fiber between the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange, that actually has negative effects on my competitors, not positive effects on my competitors. But with DoubleZero, if I run a piece of fiber from those two locations, anyone on the network is now able to use it and tie into it. And so the thing that's really cool about the network effects for DoubleZero is the more valuable the link you bring, the more you're rewarded for providing that link. And that's kind of how the long-term economics like balance out and work is that that's really what the main focus is, I would say, is creating win-win situations where providers that bring the highest quality links are rewarded for that. Over the long term, and this is probably a year or so out, maybe a little more, is we're adding prioritized data as well. because not all these network links are the same time. For example, there's five different paths right now into Tokyo, and each one of those network links has different latency associated with it. So if you are a trader really trying to land transactions, or you're trying to arbitrage, or MEV, or something like that, you may opt to pay for transit over the fastest link possible. And we expect over the long term that to be the majority of the protocol revenue. And you know, that actually makes a ton of sense. In fact, I had a conversation with an interoperability protocol a couple of weeks ago. And that was one of the questions I asked is like, you know, not all messages that pass through this bridge are equal. And so how do you prioritize? And it's really up to the user. If it's really meaningful to them, then they'll pay more to have better service. And so you're letting kind of market forces kind of work in your favor in that way. Yeah, if I'm paying for coffee or, you know, sending you some soul or something like that, who cares? We don't need prioritized fees on something like that. But if I'm, you know, trying to land in arbitrage or it's a busy time and like the price of like bitcoins falling and I really need to top up my position so I don't get liquidated, it might be worth it for me to make sure like, okay, here's a priority fee and I want the center with the fastest link possible because the risk of getting liquidated is just too great. Yeah. So let's say you're having a conversation with your parents and they asked, Hey, Austin, you raised a bunch of money. What's this thing you're building? How do you describe DoubleZero to your parents in a down to earth relatable way that they could understand? Yeah, I mean, you start with things that the network engineers get a little bit upset about, right, is usually the way this goes. But we're effectively building a new internet for high-performance blockchains, right? And it has characteristics similar to the internet, but then has all these other technologies on it that you can't build on the public internet. And that sort of idea of like a parallel series of infrastructure for different types of applications. That tends to be pretty understandable to folks. Most people understand that like a highway serves a different function than a county road, you know? And that's really like right now everything is moving over the same types of connections and that's just like not optimal for the type of systems we're trying to build into the future. I think that analogy of, you know, county road versus a highway, you know, that makes sense. And a lot of people, obviously, they have experienced that. Tell us about the reception from the Solana community. How have they been? Like, what's their reaction to 00, kind of level of support, that type of thing? So I think the slana community has been sort of primed for high performance for a few years at this point. Like the DNA of the engineers at Anza and Fire Dancer and the double and the slana foundation have always been focused on like, how do we make the thing go faster? Right? And how do make the thing more reliable? And so, know, DoubleZero has the promise to do both of those types of things. I think one of the things I really value about the slana community are There's some engineers who are like, this sounds great, I don't really want to think about it until it's live. There's this really strong focus in Solana on like, get it in prod, get it on main net, I don't really care about your white paper, I don't care about your test net code, I don't care about all this other stuff, I want to see it actually running. And that DNA is like super strong and super good, and I think that's like one of the things the Solana community really has going for it. At the same time, like, Validators we've talked to are incredibly excited because what they see is the pathway for 10xing to 100xing the block rewards. Bigger blocks, more transactions per second mean more transaction fees. And this has kind of always been the Solana thing. There's like two ways to sell software. You can have Amazon sell a $2 billion contract to the Pentagon to build a government cloud system, or you can just have every company in the world pay you $10 a month per user. Right? And like Ethereum for a while was going on the like Pentagon contract model and there's nothing wrong with that. But Solana has always been closer to the SaaS model where it's like lower margins, but we make it up in volume. And so I think a lot of people are pretty predisposed to these ideas that what we need to do to sort of help scale the network and to keep it competitive over the long term is just be relentlessly focused on increasing capacity. Let's talk about community. As you're bootstrapping the network, of course you need validators, need bandwidth providers, you need folks to actually contribute into the network and to do work. What about community members that may not necessarily be technical? How are you thinking about support from them and maybe their participation? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I will say that our primary focus is on validator and RPC operators and network contributors. And so we have lots of people, if you go in the Discord right now, there's a lot of people just very excited about DoubleZero. And it was very funny, like I actually like reached out, so it's Eden who runs like a community and some marketing for us. And I was like, we're not like paying for anything, are we? And she's like, no, of course not. And I was like, okay, because there's a lot of people. Excited about this who I don't know anything about these folks right and so the idea is kind of like it's I was surprised how much a reception we got this is like the unsexiest project in crypto It's like physical infrastructure But people are very excited about what this can bring and I think Like a core belief of mine is people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for And so like all this like, just dumb it down. They need to like, they need a smooth brain take is like, I don't think that's true. I think a lot of like people on crypto Twitter, even if they're not engineers, like they get how this stuff works, at least on a systems level perspective. And so when you tell them like, we're going to use the same technologies that Citadel has been using to front run people for years, but we're going to apply it to open permissionless blockchains. They're like, that sounds super cool. Like I want to learn more about this stuff. And so. The reception from the Solana community has been great. And honestly, the reception from the Ethereum community has been much stronger than I was expected to. We have tons of L2s reaching out to us being like, hey, we think this will solve a lot of problems that we have too. And we want to start decentralizing sequencers or building real-time censorship prevention layers. So if a sequencer sensors a transaction, you have a better recourse than just two hours later submitting it to the Ethereum L1. You actually have real-time guarantees of inclusion and those sorts of things. So I think there's a, I've been surprised how receptive people have been and how excited people have been about the project. Well, I think at least for me, I mean, I'm attracted to kind of big things and you know, what DoubleZero represents is like something very, very big. I mean, it has the potential to really change kind of how business operates and how we think about blockchains and the things it could enable. I mean, we can't really even imagine what those things are, but we can, we have an idea. And so it's attractive. I mean, it's super interesting and building, you're doing something big. and that's always exciting and I'm rooting for you. mean, is rooting for you and the team. I think it's really great. I know of a decentralized RPC project and they asked me, hey, do you know anyone to double zero? And I said, you know what? I'm actually talking to one of the co-founders. So maybe I'll make an intro after this call. Yeah, we'd love to. The thing with, decentralized RPC is, actually a classic example of one of the problems that we're trying to solve for, because it's a rough business, man. Like, it is really, because no one's willing to pay for decentralization, because the decentralized RPC is always slower than the centralized RPC. By the time you've gone to the load balancer and it's figured out which of the decentralized systems you want to go to, like, This is the problem the graph has had for years, is that they have credible censorship resistance, but they're slower than the alternatives. And so one of the things that's really cool about DoubleZero is when things are operating on it, they can just subscribe to state updates via multicast. And you can actually build custom multicast groups for things like request response and these sorts of things. And so I think it's one of those things where we can actually push back on some of the centralizing forces on the industry by enabling people the freedom to actually run stuff in more locations and not have the colocation forces that we see today sort of coming from blockchain. That's awesome. Well, Austin, thank you so much for taking the time to spend with us and to teach us about DoubleZero. We're rooting for you. We're excited for you. And I will make sure to share in the show notes all the ways they can learn more about DoubleZero and how the audience can get involved. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Thank you.