Following a $28 million funding round and testnet beta launch, DoubleZero, a network hoping to become a parallel internet for blockchains plans a public mainnet launch in the second half of 2025.
In a March 5 statement from the Double Zero Foundation, they hope to be a substitute for the public internet whereby network operators can contribute underused bandwidth to a dedicated network constructed for systems like blockchains.
A New Blockchain Internet
Co-founder of DoubleZero, Austin Federa, said in a March 5 post to X that the initiative is open for anyone with fiber, which aims to bring private networking technology to blockchain and distributed systems owned by their operators.
“Faster is better, but faster by itself is insufficient. Faster has to include everyone on the (physical fiber) network having the same access to data (state) as everyone else. “This is being fair, this is being multicast, and this is the future,” he said.
Source: Austin Federa
Federa worked as the strategy lead for the Solana Foundation until December of last year when he quit after four years to start DoubleZero with Andrew McConnell, Mateo Ward, and other crypto entrepreneurs.
Federa says that the DoubleZero Foundation is building a network that will continue to power distributed systems for the next fifty years.
The network and data transport layer, not the compute, he remarked, “has reached a point where it’s slow for blockchain.”
“The targets for crypto right now are still too low.” We aim to establish a new fiber infrastructure network that can operate safely on a large scale, given that distributed systems will become the norm soon.
$28M Funding Fuels Network Expansion
Led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, the protocol just completed a $28 million token round, and more personnel will be hired using this fund for the later mainnet rollout.
Apart from the funding round, the foundation launched a testnet beta for Solana validators and Remote Procedure Calls in seven locations: Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. More cities will join the mainnet later this year.
This phase of the testnet aims to increase the size of the network and improve the system performance.
Currently, Teraswitch, Latitude.sh, Jump Crypto, Distributed Global, RockawayX, and bare metal infrastructure providers are fiber contributors.
