Article reprinted from: Foresight News
By KarenZ, Foresight News
In L1 and L2 systems, despite the increasing computing power within validators, bandwidth limitations and instability in communication delays between verification nodes remain a shackle that restricts further performance leaps.
The DoubleZero protocol is designed to break this dilemma by optimizing data flow, increasing bandwidth, and reducing latency to build a high-performance, permissionless, decentralized network framework, opening up a new path for the future development of distributed systems.
What is DoubleZero?
According to the official description, DoubleZero is not L1 or L2, but is defined as N1 (Network 1), a decentralized framework for creating and managing high-performance permissionless networks. DoubleZero's goal is to provide an infrastructure layer that accelerates communications in high-performance distributed systems to increase bandwidth and reduce latency.
The DoubleZero protocol integrates fiber links contributed by individuals and organizations to build a synchronous network to efficiently filter spam, increase bandwidth, reduce latency, and eliminate unstable factors in communications.
DoubleZero was founded by Austin Federa, Andrew McConnell, and Mateo Ward, and is supported by two core contributor teams, Firedancer and Malbec Labs. Among them, Austin Federa was originally the head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. He resigned this month to establish DoubleZero and served as the Chief Operating Officer of the DoubleZero Foundation.
Andrew McConnell is the co-founder and CTO of Malbec Labs. Malbec Labs is committed to software development, hardware acceleration and network engineering of open source protocols. In addition, Nihar Shah, the former head of data science at Mysten Labs, 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 the Solana independent validator client built by Jump Crypto. Firedancer was designed to eliminate single points of failure and enhance the overall robustness and resilience of the network. Unlike the original Rust-based validator, Firedancer is written in C language and does not contain Rust code. This choice significantly reduces the impact of potential vulnerabilities on the entire network and provides a strong guarantee for Solana's security.
According to the Lightspeed Podcast, the Firedancer demo that ran at 1 million TPS at this year’s Solana Breakpoint conference was running on DoubleZero.
The key to Firedancer’s ability to increase the performance of the Solana network to 1 million TPS (current protocol-level limitations limit performance to around 81,000 TPS) lies in its innovative architecture design and data flow optimization.
It is worth mentioning that DoubleZero’s goals are highly consistent with Solana’s overall philosophy. Solana officials and its co-founder Toly (Anatoly Yakovenko) have repeatedly emphasized “increasing bandwidth and reducing latency” on Twitter, which coincides with DoubleZero’s pursuit.
How does DoubleZero work?
According to the white paper, the DoubleZero network can bring two significant improvements to the blockchain system: First, it uses dedicated hardware to pre-filter incoming transactions, remove spam and duplicate transactions, and effectively reduce the burden on verifiers. This allows the blockchain to benefit from shared system-wide filtering resources without requiring each individual validator to provide sufficient resources. Second, it enables explicit routing, tracking and prioritization of outgoing messages to improve communication. efficiency.
In terms of network architecture, DoubleZero is cleverly divided into an external in-and-out ring and an internal data flow ring, where the former handles external interfaces and security, and the latter optimizes internal communications. Specifically, the outer ring is connected to the public Internet (outer circle in the figure below), where hardware (such as FPGA) is used to mitigate distributed denial of service attacks, verify signatures, and filter duplicate transactions. Servers on the internal data flow ring build consensus on these filtered flows through dedicated bandwidth lines with optimal routing.
The key components of the DoubleZero network architecture include network devices at the key entrances/exits of the network and bandwidth configured across the network. These network devices enable data links contributed by individuals and organizations to operate as a prioritized network, and then implement filtering, verification, and spam protection.
Fiber links on the DoubleZero network provide low-latency, high-bandwidth connections between different locations. Network contributors add idle fiber links that they own or lease to the network and sign service level agreements for each link (including endpoint location, bandwidth, latency, and compliant MTU size).
Therefore, DoubleZero sees itself as an N1 - a neutral and high-performance base layer of physical infrastructure. On this N1, distributed systems and applications (such as N2 or others) can be built.
DoubleZero pointed out in the white paper that the DoubleZero network can be used to optimize any distributed system. L1, L2, RPC nodes, and MEV systems can all join in to reduce the burden on validators, reduce distributed denial of service attacks, improve performance, etc., and benefit from increased bandwidth and reduced latency. In addition, DoubleZero's network architecture can also be applied to online games, large language model training that requires high-bandwidth connections, and other distributed systems that require low latency and high bandwidth. According to DoubleZero's vision, the DoubleZero protocol is a new economic model in the field of bandwidth and communication.
For example, on the supply side, private companies can invest idle fiber links they purchase or lease from telecom operators or network service providers into the DoubleZero system, opening up new sources of revenue. On 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 is able to match the needs of suppliers and users, helping to achieve mutual benefit by contributing and utilizing idle fiber links, and also integrating the contributions of individuals and organizations into a unified, robust and scalable global network.