Backing DoubleZero to Usher in a New Era of Blockchain Scaling
Bandwidth and latency are the new frontiers for blockchain scaling. DoubleZero is a permissionless, high-performance physical networking layer designed to optimize bandwidth and latency for all users, inclusive of all distributed applications and high-performance computing uses, but with an initial focus on blockchain validators.
At Galaxy, we aspire toward a venture investment model where we are not simply financial backers, but also contributors to the networks or products we invest in. This is a hallmark of our investment thesis at Galaxy Ventures. Galaxy’s 550-person operating business makes us uniquely situated for this model and builds long-term alignment between capital and community. Galaxy’s Strategic Opportunities team – on the other hand – operates at the intersection of blockchain technology and global financial markets, providing staking and blockchain infrastructure services to clients. The team’s expertise bridges the gap between cutting-edge blockchain infrastructure services and Galaxy’s Trading business. Our confluence of capabilities allows us to both provide capital for investment into the network, but also, in the best cases, allows us to be an early network participant.
Today, we’re excited to share that Galaxy Ventures has backed DoubleZero with a strategic investment and Galaxy’s Strategic Opportunities team has committed to deploying fiber optic cables to extend the capacity and geographic distribution of the network at launch.
What Does DoubleZero Solve? The Bandwidth Problem
Public blockchains like Solana and Ethereum have now addressed scalability issues via a variety of mechanisms, including VM parallelization, layer-two scaling with fraud and validity proofs, specialized data availability capacity, and much more. Blockchains in one way or another are subject to a constraint on at most (i) bandwidth, (ii) memory, (iii) storage, or (iv) compute. Most solutions, like L2 scaling and parallelization, solve for reducing memory or compute latency and costs. Bandwidth is an untouched frontier and is now a more applicable bottleneck for modern blockchain designs post Monad (portfolio company) and Solana’s Firedancer client. The primary thesis is that the speed of the public internet is now an obstacle to blockchain scaling in a way that wasn’t true before until systems like Monad, Solana, and Celestia, which all have pushed the space forward.
Theoretical constraints over the public internet have been seen before. This is a lesson that high-frequency trading (HFT) firms know intimately well. HFT firms spent the better part of the 2010s deploying microwave towers to gain latency advantages in arbitrage and market-making Strategies.
Solana and other public blockchains could increasingly follow this trajectory. Until now, Solana (which is at the leading edge of execution optimization alongside Monad) has been bottlenecked by compute. Specifically, the 30-50k theoretical maximum transactions per second (tps) is constrained by ECDSA (elliptic curve) signature-verify operations and Solana’s scheduler.
However, Firedancer’s stated theoretical maximum tps is 1M+, meaning that Solana is likely to encounter tps constraints in consensus and block propagation first before re-encountering compute constraints. All blockchains will more or less face this problem as they scale.
DoubleZero, The First Ever N1 – The Network below the Network
Using techniques from DePIN, DoubleZero is a first-of-its-kind, decentralized fiber network built to introduce a private internet upon which blockchain protocols will run their validator networks. However, DoubleZero’s network is not limited to blockchain protocols like Solana and Monad. It could extend to general applications like trading, gaming, and web2 content delivery (CDNs). Individually contributed fiber links are combined into a synchronized network that increases bandwidth, lowers latency, and removes jitter from communication.
By leveraging underutilized dark fiber and already-lit fiber leveraged by HFT (high frequency trading) firms, DoubleZero provides a low-latency, high-bandwidth alternative to the traditional public internet tailored to public blockchain networks, including and especially Solana. This approach positions DoubleZero at the intersection of blockchain scaling, telecommunications, and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), creating a unique opportunity to redefine the global data transport layer for public blockchains.
DoubleZero Network Topology - DoubleZero has 70+ global connections planned for the mainnet-beta DoubleZero network as below:
The Galaxy x DoubleZero Collaboration
Galaxy’s Strategic Opportunities team has actively participated in the Solana ecosystem by running a top 10 largest validator (currently 3rd as of time of writing) and operating Solana infrastructure at globally distributed points of presence. DoubleZero presents an interesting value proposition to Solana validators, who may be able to receive information faster if using the DoubleZero network.
Strategic Opportunities empowers Galaxy to explore new revenue streams, enhance existing offerings, and solidify its position as a forward-thinking leader in the evolving financial landscape. Strategic Opportunities’ participation not only represents a continued investment in Solana’s growth but also establishes the team as a central player in all future ecosystems built on this layer. We see DoubleZero evolving beyond a blockchain performance booster into a robust, private internet that runs low-latency applications and distributed systems.
Backing DoubleZero to Usher in a New Era of Blockchain Scaling
At Galaxy Ventures, we believe that the future of financial services globally is being built on blockchain rails – right here, right now. Our investment in and infrastructure support for DoubleZero reflect our conviction that improving finance on blockchains means addressing every layer of the stack – from the cross-border stablecoin payment transactions at the application layer, to the L1 transactions at the protocol layer, to the information dissemination in the fiber optic cables themselves via DoubleZero. It also reflects our conviction that the best partnerships are about more than capital. As the first N1 network, DoubleZero represents a foundational leap forward in how bandwidth and connectivity are provisioned, unlocking new possibilities for blockchain protocols and distributed applications. We are excited to help build this future alongside the DoubleZero team and welcome other innovators to join us in shaping the next era of the internet.
If you’re building infrastructure for decentralized networks, get in touch with us at [email protected] or [email protected].
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