A network aspiring to serve as an alternative internet for blockchains is gearing up for a public mainnet debut in the latter half of 2025 following the successful completion of a $28 million funding round and a testnet beta introduction.
The DoubleZero Network aims to provide a substitute to the public internet, enabling network providers to contribute underutilized bandwidth to a specialized network designed for systems like blockchains, as per a statement from the DoubleZero Foundation dated March 5.
Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, declared in a post to X on March 5 that the initiative seeks to integrate private networking technology into blockchains and distributed systems on a network controlled by its users and is open to anyone with fiber to join.
“Speed is essential, but speed on its own is insufficient. Speed must encompass the ability for everyone on the (physical fiber) network to have equal access to data (state) as all others. This is equity — this is multicast — this represents our future,” he stated.
Source: Austin Federa
Federa previously served as the Strategy Lead at the Solana Foundation until last December when he left after four years to establish DoubleZero with cryptocurrency entrepreneurs Andrew McConnell and Mateo Ward.
The DoubleZero Foundation is constructing the network to become the foundational technology that will drive the next fifty years of distributed systems, according to Federa.
“We’ve arrived at a point where the bottleneck for blockchain actually lies in the network and data transport layer, rather than the computing,” he remarked.
“The current aspirations for cryptocurrency are still too limited. We envision a near future that is entirely supported by distributed systems, and our objective is to provide a new fiber infrastructure network that can securely enable that at scale.”
The protocol recently wrapped up a $28 million token fundraising round co-led by venture capital firms Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital to recruit additional personnel for the mainnet launch later this year.
Related: Solana upgrades will enhance network but constrict validators — VanEck
Alongside the funding round, the foundation also initiated a testnet beta for Solana validators and Remote Procedure Calls across seven locations: Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, with more cities expected to join the mainnet later this year.
The present testnet phase is focused on enhancing the system’s effectiveness and scalability of the network.
Currently, Jump Crypto, Distributed Global, RockawayX, along with bare metal infrastructure providers Teraswitch and Latitude.sh, are functioning as fiber contributors.
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