#438: Austin Federa, Co-Founder of DoubleZero, on The Next Internet, The Future of Solana, and Validators

May 12, 2025

Austin Federa, Co-founder of DoubleZero and former Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, dives into the vibrant future of Solana and its unique position in the blockchain landscape. He shares insights from the recent Token 2049 event in Dubai and discusses the critical role of validators in enhancing performance. The conversation touches on AI's impact on society and the founding story of DoubleZero, revealing its mission to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Austin maintains an optimistic view on technological advancements shaping a better future.

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INSIGHT

Solana's Collaborative Competition

Solana's competition is strong but collaborative within its ecosystem, unlike Ethereum's fragmented L2 systems.
This dynamic encourages both cooperation on protocol improvements and fierce competition for users.

INSIGHT

Emergency Patches Ensure Security

Solana's emergency patches are engineer-driven for security, not optics.
Quick private patches protect against exploits and reflect decentralization, not centralization.

INSIGHT

Optimism Amid Challenges

Despite current global challenges, we are on a positive trajectory overall.
Awareness of suffering is higher now, but global poverty reduction shows significant progress.

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Austin Federa is the Co-Founder of DoubleZero, a dedicated high-performance network for modern distributed systems, and President of the DoubleZero Foundation.

Prior to co-founding DoubleZero in 2024, Austin served as Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation where he was responsible for setting the direction of the Foundation and working with projects and developers building across the Solana ecosystem. Previously, Austin worked on marketing and product at Bison Trails, and was Director of Marketing at Republic and Republic Crypto, a private investing platform.

In this conversation, we discuss:
- The future of Solana
- Token 2049 & Dubai
- Solana’s emergency patch
- We are living in the best time, and we’re on a good track
- How AI will impact our lives
- The founding story of Double Zero
- Increase bandwidth and reduce latency
- Testnet transactions are always quicker than mainnet
- Manufacturing
- Scaling to 500,000 TPS
- Why validators are so important
- Data routing is a huge problem for high-performance networks

DoubleZero
Website: doublezero.xyz
X: @doublezero
Discord: discord.gg/doublezero

Austin Federa
X: @Austin_Federa
LinkedIn: Austin Federa

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