Austin Federa: From Solana Foundation to Double Zero's Fiber Revolution
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Guys. Salon and other high throughput chains are hitting Internet limits, not software limits. And for that reason, I'm here today with Austin Fadera, co founder and CEO of DoubleZero, about building a permissionless, high performance fiber pipeline, starting with the Solana network and its validator set as an initial target market. We're gonna dig into how it works, what changes for operators, and how to keep it fair. I do need to disclose Delphi is an investor in double zero, and nothing here is investment advice. I also need to disclose that I'm super bullish about Austin and this project,
See, now I think your interest in the project was just the pain meds. Hey, thanks for having me here today.
Of course. So as you guys know, I'm Alex Goldie, I'm a VC here at Delphi Ventures. Before that, I worked at Solana Labs briefly in the 2021 on our business development and venture capital teams. And while I was there, I met Austin. And I got to know Austin. I got to experience his work ethic, his personal got to watch the way he comported himself, the way he did business, the way he interacted with others. And now, we get to come along for the ride with Double Zero. As I mentioned, they're working on a problem that's solving something that affects the entire internet. And I'd love if maybe he
So take away from I'm one of the three co founders of DoubleZero, and we really are building a parallel internet for high performance distributed systems. Effectively And what this is, is we've been limited in not just crypto, but mostly crypto for a number of years by the fact that everything relies on the public internet. And that may seem a little bit like an oxymoron because you look at these companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, you think, Oh, these are all giant public internet companies. How is the public internet holding back these organizations? And the answer is
That's really cool. And so what inspired you to take this on? What gave you the idea that this was even an opportunity? You had this great role the Solana Foundation, and so after you saw this opportunity, what convinced you to then leave Solana and go found this?
Yeah, so I joined Solana in late twenty twenty after working for Bison Trails, which got acquired by Coinbase and became Coinbase Cloud. And so in the four years at Solana, I sort of sat there and saw the rise of the protocol from, know, I think 1 point dollars 2 when I joined all the way up to the highs of 2021, then the lows of post FTX back to the place that it is now today. And through that process, you really see engineering getting much more performant, really heavily optimizing the validator client. One of the projects that I had some involvement in here was the Firedancer project, whic
That's awesome. I got a lot of follow-up questions, but unfortunately, I only ask one at a time. Before we dive too deep into things, could we maybe level set and just help people understand in one sentence what the connection is between Metis fiber and zero's vision. Are you guys going to be participating in Metis fiber? You going to have your own fiber? Do you have anything around any type of tech around that or around your fiber lines? Yeah, we just talk
Yeah, about that, totally. So similar to on a compute based blockchain network like Solana or Ethereum, the Solana Foundation doesn't run the validators, the Ethereum Foundation doesn't run the validators. We don't actually run fiber at zero ourselves. What we build and manage is a software orchestration system that runs o
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