Austin Federa (DoubleZero) on Building a Better Internet (EP.664)
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Today, I sat down with Austin Federa, cofounder of DoubleZero. DoubleZero is a new network of physical infrastructure to make blockchains and ultimately other Internet technologies run faster. Austin started DoubleZero last year after spending four years in senior roles at the Solana Foundation solving infrastructure problems of how to make Solana an exceptionally fast and cheap money movement layer. DoubleZero was born out of that firsthand experience. Austin brings an incredibly informed view on the intersection of blockchains, Internet infrastructure, and market coordination. It was a pleas
Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Casinos may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.
Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.
The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85,000,000,000. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of
England has pumped £75,000,000,000 more into Britain's ailing economy, and the new round of constituted easy.
They print a couple trillion and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Austin, thanks for sitting down with us today. I have heard a lot about double zero. I'm excited to dive in as well as about some of your experience. Would you mind just kicking off with what is double zero for people who might be unfamiliar, vaguely familiar, or trying to familiarize themselves?
So double zero is a crypto infrastructure project, but it's actual infrastructure, not just software systems. Because because usually when crypto people talk about infrastructure, they're really just talking about software. What we are building and have built out is a high performance global fiber network optimized for the types of problems that high performance distributed systems have as opposed to the types of problems that you see on the public Internet today, which are more about reach than they are about performance. So we have 10 independent contributors that are all contributing fiber
There's an irony because I think in AI and in other facets of technology, data data centers have really started to take popular mind share, and people are focused on the hardware infrastructure, but it feels very much like something people miss on the crypto side.
If you think about it, pretty much every large software company is in hardware now. And they're not in hardware because they want to be. Facebook did not start building its own servers and then building its own data centers and then building its own high speed subsea fiber because they wanted to. They got into it because the existing market wouldn't service their needs for scale. And they're not running subsea cables through The Philippines out of the goodness of their heart or because it's a plus EV business line. They're doing it so they can sell ads. They want Instagram reels to load more q
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