A former Solana executive is adopting strategies from Wall Street to enhance the speed of international cryptocurrency transactions.

The objective is to diminish Solana’s increasing geographic concentration in Europe and implement multicast capabilities.

Key information:

• DoubleZero, a cryptocurrency infrastructure company co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is implementing a significant update intended to distribute Solana’s network more uniformly across the globe while enhancing its speed.
• On March 9, the firm will initiate “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, reallocating 2.4 million SOL from its pool of 13 million SOL to validators situated in underrepresented locations such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
• The aim is straightforward: to lessen Solana’s increasing geographic concentration in Europe and promote a more global presence.

DoubleZero, a cryptocurrency infrastructure firm co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is implementing a significant update intended to distribute Solana’s network more uniformly across the globe while enhancing its speed.

On March 9, the firm will initiate “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, reallocating 2.4 million SOL from its pool of 13 million SOL to validators situated in underrepresented locations such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each location will receive up to 600,000 SOL in additional delegated stake incentives.

DoubleZero operates a private, high-speed internet network that facilitates faster and more reliable communication among Solana’s computers. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation.

DoubleZero’s objective in introducing the incentive is clear: to diminish Solana’s increasing geographic concentration in Europe and to implement “multicast functionality,” a data distribution technique commonly utilized in traditional finance.

Geographic concentration

One of the primary objectives of Federa is to mitigate the geographic concentration of validators.

“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains becoming faster is that there’s a greater incentive to co-locate,” Federa stated during an interview. He likened it to the initial high-frequency trading competition on Wall Street, where firms rushed to position servers closer to the New York Stock Exchange to gain milliseconds on trades.

Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: A Q&A With Austin Federa on DoubleZero

Currently, a significant portion of Solana’s staked tokens, which secure the network, are located in Central Europe—primarily due to historical and economic factors. “There were many high-quality, cost-effective bare-metal data centers in Europe,” Federa noted. “Solana was optimized for that kind of hosting early on, and the infrastructure developed there.”

However, geographic clustering presents trade-offs: If the majority of validators are situated in Europe, users located further away may face disadvantages.

“If I’m in South America attempting to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa remarked. “But someone with a computer in Germany might actually complete that trade before me.”

To rectify this imbalance, DoubleZero is providing 2.4 million SOL and aims to make it financially feasible for validators to operate outside conventional centers.

'More reliable'

The next challenge DoubleZero seeks to address through this new initiative is data transmission latency.

The primary obstacle to expanding into those areas isn’t technical, according to Federa—it is economic. “Since you’re located further away, everything takes longer to reach you. It’s similar to Amazon Prime—if you’re in New York, you receive it the same day. In Montana, it can take four or five days.”

DoubleZero states that its private fiber network helps alleviate connectivity challenges, while the new delegation incentives are designed to counterbalance the economic disadvantages of operating outside traditional hubs.

This is why, in addition to the geographic initiative, DoubleZero is introducing multicast functionality to Solana.

Federa compared it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of viewers can watch that radio wave… and it doesn’t impose any additional burden.” Streaming, on the other hand, necessitates a distinct data stream for each viewer.

Currently, blockchain networks operate similarly to streaming services—transmitting duplicate data repeatedly. Multicast, he explained, alters that dynamic.

“In a pre-multicast environment, if I’m transmitting data to 1,000 nodes, I’m distributing 1,000 copies,” he stated. “With multicast, I transmit one copy, and the network hardware duplicates it closer to its destination.”

This approach minimizes bandwidth costs, enhances fairness in data reception speed among participants, and allows for more future upgrades. It also aligns blockchain infrastructure more closely with traditional exchanges, which heavily rely on multicast.

“Traditional finance is not only quicker than blockchain—it’s also more reliable,” Federa emphasized. “If we can introduce greater determinism to blockchain networking, it becomes a much more appealing environment for market makers and traders.”

Ultimately, DoubleZero is wagering that financial incentives of this nature will facilitate the global expansion of Solana’s infrastructure, moving it toward functioning as a genuinely real-time market.

Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet Goes Live With 22% of Staked SOL on Board