Why this ex-Solana exec is using a Wall Street trick to level the playing field in DeFi

Austin Federa quit as the Solana Foundation's head of strategy in 2024 to tackle what he saw as unfairness in the crypto trading environment. Eighteen months later, his company, DoubleZero, says it's ready.

DoubleZero aims to eliminate proximity to an exchange's servers as a competitive advantage for traders. The private fiber network removes latency, the time it takes for an order to reach the platform from a trader's desk, as a factor and introduces a more equitable environment even though regulators — and traders — aren't asking for it yet.

The problem, Federa says, is that crypto conflates decentralized with distributed. DeFi protocols are decentralized by virtue of their open-source code and permissionless validator sets, but when milliseconds determine who wins a trade, the laws of physics push validators to cluster in the same data centers anyway. On platforms like Hyperliquid, for example, Tokyo-based traders enjoy a roughly 200-millisecond edge over rivals abroad.

"Hyperliquid may be a decentralized system from a governance and user perspective, but it is not a distributed system," Federa said in an interview with CoinDesk. "It is still co-located in the same environment, even if it's run by multiple different entities."

It's a problem traditional finance has already faced. When the New York Stock Exchange developed its Mahwah, New Jersey data center over a decade ago, it engineered cable-length equalization to within a nanosecond because asymmetric access was bad for business, not because regulators required it. Simply, traders who felt disadvantaged would route their orders elsewhere.

Read more: A former Solana exec is taking a page out of Wall Street playbook to make global crypto trades faster

DoubleZero's solution is timestamping.

The network aggregates private bandwidth from operators to route blockchain data over dedicated links, while giving venues tools to timestamp orders across global entry points and reconstruct a fair sequence similar in aim to the cable equalization used by the NYSE.

The challenge isn't just speed, but verifiability. On a venue running over the public internet, a trader whose order arrives late has no way to distinguish ordinary network congestion from something more deliberate.

"Is that true because the public internet drops packets all the time, or is that true because you saw my transaction and said, 'Hey, this guy's pretty good, I don't want to include this block,'" Federa said. "The counter-factual is really hard to prove."

DoubleZero's pitch is that a managed network with deterministic latency makes that distinction provable. Physics still applies: A New York trading desk routing through DoubleZero to reach Hyperliquid in Tokyo will not outrun a nearer competitor in AWS’s ap-northeast-1 region.