What is DoubleZero, founded by the former strategic head of the Solana Foundation?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

In L1 and L2 systems, despite the increasing computational power of validators, the limitations of bandwidth and the instability of communication delays between validation nodes remain shackles that restrict further leaps in performance.

The DoubleZero protocol is designed to break this predicament by optimizing data flow, increasing bandwidth, and reducing latency, building a high-performance, permissionless decentralized network framework that paves new paths for the future development of distributed systems.

What is DoubleZero?

According to official descriptions, DoubleZero is neither L1 nor L2, but is defined as N1 (Network 1), a decentralized framework for creating and managing high-performance permissionless networks. DoubleZero aims to provide an infrastructure layer to accelerate communication in high-performance distributed systems, increasing bandwidth and reducing latency.

The DoubleZero protocol builds a synchronized network by integrating fiber links contributed by individuals and organizations, efficiently filtering spam, increasing bandwidth, lowering latency, and eliminating instability in communication.

DoubleZero was created by Austin Federa, Andrew McConnell, and Mateo Ward, and is supported by two core contributor teams, Firedancer and Malbec Labs. Austin Federa was originally the strategic head of the Solana Foundation, who resigned this month to found DoubleZero and serves as the chief operating officer of the DoubleZero Foundation.

Andrew McConnell is the co-founder and CTO of Malbec Labs. Malbec Labs is dedicated to software development, hardware acceleration, and network engineering for open-source protocols. Additionally, Nihar Shah, the former head of data science at Mysten Labs, has also left to join DoubleZero as chief economist. Nihar Shah previously worked at Jump Crypto and Meta (Libra/Diem).

Another core contributor team, Firedancer, is an independent validator client for Solana built by Jump Crypto. Firedancer was designed to eliminate single points of failure, enhancing the overall robustness and resilience of the network. Unlike the original Rust-based validators, Firedancer is written in C language, which does not include Rust code, significantly reducing the potential impact of vulnerabilities on the entire network, thereby providing strong security guarantees for Solana.

According to the Lightspeed podcast, the demonstration of Firedancer operating at a speed of 1 million TPS during this year's Solana Breakpoint conference runs on top of DoubleZero.

The reason Firedancer can elevate the performance of the Solana network to 1 million TPS (the current protocol-level limit caps performance around 81,000 TPS) lies in its innovative architectural design and data flow optimization.

Recommended reading: (What exactly is Firedancer, which was highly regarded at Breakpoint?)

It is worth mentioning that the goals of DoubleZero align closely with the overall philosophy of Solana. Solana's officials and its co-founder Toly (Anatoly Yakovenko) have repeatedly emphasized on Twitter the importance of 'increasing bandwidth, reducing latency,' which coincides with DoubleZero's pursuits.

How does DoubleZero operate?

According to the white paper, the DoubleZero network brings two significant enhancements to blockchain systems: first, it filters incoming transactions through dedicated hardware in advance, removing spam and duplicate transactions, effectively reducing the burden on validators. This allows the blockchain to benefit from shared system-level filtering resources without requiring each individual validator to provide sufficient resources; second, it implements clear routing, tracking, and prioritization of outgoing messages to improve communication efficiency.

In terms of network architecture, DoubleZero cleverly divides itself into external ingress and egress loops and internal data flow loops. The former handles external interfaces and security, while the latter optimizes internal communication. Specifically, the outer loop connects to the public internet (the outer circle in the diagram), using hardware (such as FPGAs) to mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks, verify signatures, and filter duplicate transactions. Servers in the internal data flow loop build consensus on these filtered traffic using dedicated bandwidth lines with optimal routing.

From the architecture of the DoubleZero network, we can see its key components, including network devices at the critical ingress/egress points and bandwidth configured across networks. These network devices enable data links contributed by individuals and organizations to operate as a prioritized network, implementing filtering, validation, and spam protection.

The fiber links on the DoubleZero network provide low-latency high-bandwidth connections between different locations. Network contributors will add their owned or leased idle fiber links to the network and sign service level agreements for each link (including endpoint location, bandwidth, latency, and compliant MTU size).

As a result, DoubleZero sees itself as an N1—an underlying layer of neutral and high-performance physical infrastructure. On this N1, distributed systems and applications (such as N2 or others) can be built.

The DoubleZero white paper states that the DoubleZero network can be used to optimize any distributed system. L1, L2, RPC nodes, and MEV systems can be included to reduce the burden on validators, mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks, and enhance performance, benefiting from increased bandwidth and reduced latency. Moreover, the network architecture of DoubleZero can also be applied to online gaming, large language model training requiring high bandwidth connections, and other distributed systems that need low latency and high bandwidth. According to DoubleZero's vision, the DoubleZero protocol represents a new economic model in the fields of bandwidth and communication.

For example, on the supply side, private enterprises can contribute their idle fiber links purchased or leased from telecom operators or network service providers into the DoubleZero system, opening up new revenue streams. At the user and operator level, DoubleZero allows distributed systems to enjoy the advantages of private networks without relying on centralized systems or long-term contracts.

Overall, the DoubleZero protocol can match the needs between suppliers and users, achieving a win-win situation by contributing and utilizing idle fiber links, and integrating the contributions of individuals and organizations into a unified, robust, and highly scalable global network.