DoubleZero, a project aiming to establish a global fiber network for high-performance distributed systems and blockchains, recently announced a successful $28 million funding round. This significant investment, co-led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital in March 2025, underscores the growing demand for specialized infrastructure to overcome current internet limitations for decentralized technologies. The company's vision centers on enhancing bandwidth and reducing latency to foster innovation across various distributed applications.
The project operates on the principle that "abundance breeds innovation," as stated by DoubleZero on its social media. This core belief drives its mission to create a "new internet" optimized for the demanding requirements of modern distributed systems. The company asserts that "every step-function change in availability or corresponding reduction in latency opens up entirely new types of applications and uses for distributed systems."
DoubleZero addresses critical bottlenecks faced by Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains, which are often constrained by bandwidth limitations and variable latency between communication nodes rather than computing power. By enabling the permissionless contribution of independent fiber links, DoubleZero aims to create a dynamic, expansive, and low-latency global network. This infrastructure, dubbed an "N1 protocol," is designed to filter spam, increase bandwidth, and reduce jitter for efficient data transmission.
Co-founded by Austin Federa, former head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, DoubleZero is building a dedicated physical infrastructure layer to accelerate communication. Federa emphasized that the project seeks to bring private networking technology to blockchains and distributed systems on a network owned by its operators. The network also aims to benefit other high-throughput, low-latency applications such as ZK provers, GPU workloads, online gaming, and large language model training.
Following its successful funding, DoubleZero launched a testnet beta earlier this year, with plans for a mainnet rollout in the second half of 2025. The project has also initiated a validator token sale, inviting prospective validators to participate in securing the network. This development positions DoubleZero as a key player in revolutionizing the underlying physical infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized and distributed applications.