DoubleZero’s alternative to public internet targets mainnet rollout in H2

A network hoping to become a parallel internet for blockchains is planning a public mainnet launch in the second half of 2025 after completing a $28 million funding round and testnet beta launch.

The DoubleZero Network hopes to be an alternative to the public internet that allows network operators to contribute underutilized bandwidth to a dedicated network built for systems like blockchains, according to a March 5 statement from the DoubleZero Foundation.

Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, said in a March 5 post to X that the project is an attempt to bring private networking technology to blockchains and distributed systems on a network owned by its operators and that it is open for anyone with fiber to participate.

“Faster is better, but faster alone is not enough. Faster must include the ability for everyone on the (physical fiber) network to have the same access to data (state) as everyone else. This is fairness — this is multicast — this is the future,” he said. 

Source: Austin Federa

Federa was the Solana Foundation Strategy Lead until last December, when he departed after four years to found DoubleZero with crypto entrepreneurs Andrew McConnell and Mateo Ward. 

The DoubleZero Foundation is building the network to become the legacy technology powering the next half-century of distributed systems, according to Federa.

“We’ve reached a point where the bottleneck for blockchain is actually on the network and data transport layer, not the compute,” he said. 

“The current ambition for crypto is still too small. We see a near future that’s fully underpinned by distributed systems, and our vision is to provide a new fiber infrastructure network that can securely power that at mass scale.” 

The protocol recently completed a $28 million token round co-led by venture capital firms Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital to hire more staff for the mainnet rollout later this year. 

Related: Solana upgrades will strengthen network but squeeze validators — VanEck

In conjunction with the funding round, the foundation also launched a testnet beta for Solana validators and Remote Procedure Calls across seven cities: Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, with additional cities coming to mainnet later in the year.

The current phase of the testnet aims to improve the system’s efficiency and scalability of the network. 

At the moment, Jump Crypto, Distributed Global, RockawayX and bare metal infrastructure providers Teraswitch and Latitude.sh are operating as fiber contributors.

Magazine: Off The Grid’s ‘biggest update yet,’ Rumble Kong League review: Web3 Gamer