DoubleZero Foundation raises $28 million to expand a 'global fiber network' for blockchains

DoubleZero Foundation, an organization supporting the DoubleZero protocol that aims to build a “global fiber network” for high-performance blockchains and distributed systems, has raised $28 million in a token round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital.

Other investors in the round included Foundation Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, DBA, Borderless Capital, Superscrypt and Frictionless.

“The foundation plans to use the proceeds to hire key roles in marketing, developer relations, and business development and to help usher the network out of testnet beta into public mainnet in the second half of this year,” the team said.

DoubleZero aims to offer increased bandwidth and reduced latency for high-performance blockchains by leveraging fiber links from independent network contributors.

DoubleZero also announced today the launch of its permissioned testnet, which will make DoubleZero's protocol available to Solana validators and RPCs in the testing phase. 

“Currently, the DoubleZero foundation is focused on the launch of the permissioned testnet and onboarding Solana validators and RPCs before heading into a permissionless testnet,” Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, told The Block, adding that the project is essentially designed to become the new physical infrastructure backbone for high-performance blockchains. Federa previously served as head of strategy at the Solana Foundation.

Its core contributors include Malbec Labs and Jump Crypto, and the testnet currently lives in seven cities — namely, Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

“Due to the public Internet’s bandwidth limitations and non-deterministic routing, it is difficult to reliably deliver a Web2-like experience without first solving latency between validators,” said Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, noting that DoubleZero seeks to solve this component of scaling blockchains.