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Hold Strong #23 👑 @doublezero
Recorded: June 16, 2025 Duration: 0:53:28Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Austin unveiled Double Zero, a groundbreaking project aimed at revolutionizing blockchain scalability with the potential to achieve a million transactions per second. He emphasized the importance of improving internet infrastructure to support this vision and confirmed plans for a token launch to incentivize participation in the network.
Full Transcription
Thank you. okay fox one two fox one two gm gm, welcome back to Hold Strong, episode number 23.
So excited to have you guys here today.
So excited for the talk today because you guys are going to learn.
You 100%, everyone here is going to walk away smarter because we have the man, the myth, the legend himself.
Austin is up here with his project, Double Zero.
We're going to be excited to learn more about this.
But really quick, let's go around, make sure that we got mic and vibe checks starting of course with our guest
of honor awesome it is good to see you today fam how are you feeling today hey how you doing this
is my first time joining from the computer is this like working yeah it's working it actually
only like really gives you problems if you host the space from the computer okay great yes on the
pc you should be good.
You sound fantastic.
PFP looks amazing.
Facing the wrong way, but we're going to accept it for everything that you've done for Salada
and for all of us in with Double Zero.
And really quick, we're going to circle back to you in one moment.
Let's get quick mic checks on the rest of my team up here, who also was live with me
at Startup Village supporting Super Team Balkan.
Callahan, professor, it's good to see you, fam.
How are you feeling today?
Hey, hey, hey. Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for the intro.
Bullish as always, excited as always.
It was great at Startup Village with you,
obviously sharing great weather, great vibes,
and doing some workshops.
So it was amazing.
Very excited for this week also because we're going to be at Apex Budapest.
So that should also be amazing. And yeah, excited for the space today.
Following the Solana World Tour, man.
Wherever Solana is, Soul Flayer is going to be there and they're sending this Fox.
So appreciate you guys. Anyone that's going to be at Budapest, make sure to come say hi.
And of course, our other member from the team, fresh out of another space, running it back to back. M maki it's good to see you again fam how are you doing today hey everyone doing well as usual
uh good monday nice weather summer here uh only callahan a bit kind of on the down low there but
i can i can survive so yeah all and split we had a great time as well it was super fun um quicks
uh did an amazing job uh i am seeing the everything there everything and i mean everything
uh especially me on callahan's kind of speeches and workshops right we also had a uh i would say
an interview no it was a podcast type of thing with Quix
where I shared a bit too much alpha.
So we'll see how Quix edits that as well for the community there.
I think everyone will love it.
We'll just see when to drop it.
And yeah, looking forward to this space.
And talking about this amazing community,
also I was a champion at go-kart racing,
but talking about this amazing community,
shout out our guardians and our ambassadors
up here, Marky, Witty and FTO
appreciate you guys, G4G
we only have Austin for a limited amount
of time today, you know, only a short hour with him
so I want to try to get as much out
of this space as possible
and if you guys have questions, as of course
make sure that you're writing them down in the comments
as well as liking and reposting, it's completely
free to do and costs you nothing at all and truly does help us with
the algorithm. This is going to be an important conversation we're having today, so make sure to
share it. It's also recorded. And we also do invite 10 new guardians every week. So if you
are looking to join the Soul Flare Guardians community, make sure that you're hitting the
comments on why you would make a good guardian and drop your TV. And at the end of the show,
we'll be adding 10 manually. So appreciate the love support let's get into it and if you guys have
questions up here just throw your paw up and i'll go around but i got some questions for austin
first but austin before we get into double zero let's really quick meet you let's get a little
bit about the origin story because for many of our guardians this is their first cycle they may not
know about the man the myth the legend so let's give us a little origin story of boston what brought you to solana and what have you uh done before double zero
yeah hey thanks um yeah i joined solana in the end of 2020 beginning of 2021 uh for the classic
startup title of product slash marketing slash chief of staff, you know, which means very, very little.
And that's kind of how startup things go.
Before that, I was working for Bison Trails, which was a blockchain infrastructure company
that got acquired by Coinbase.
I was working on the product marketing and platform team there.
And before that, I actually worked for Republic and helped them launch Republic
crypto back in the day and did a bunch of crazy 2017 public markets stuff through them.
But we go back far enough. Actually, in college, I did political science, environmental science,
and most of my undergraduate work was on basically uh this is very nerdy very deep here
uh compliance mechanisms and freshwater management treaties between countries that are in conflict
with one another um which is like in retrospect kind of a degree in blockchain it's all about how
do you create like enforcement mechanisms and economic structures to do things like keep the
water flowing,
even though India and Pakistan routinely go to somewhere between real war and small war with one
another, but they don't turn off the water. Like that is pretty impressive. And you can compare
that to how that hasn't worked in some other areas. And so I was like, almost ready to go
down the PhD route coming out of coming out of of college and just decided that it wasn't quite going to have the impact
that I was hoping it would.
I remember I was on the NBER website,
the National Bureau of Economic Relations,
where all the papers get posted.
I remember this crazy stat where the average paper had four authors
and the average paper was downloaded six times.
So like even their mom wasn't reading the paper. And I was like, I think I want to do something
else. And a lot of like white papers that were launched, you know, over the 100%.
So, uh, yeah, that was kind of the, you know, I originally worked for some startups and I kind of found that like for all of the language and talk about web two and like, oh, you can build anything.
It's so amazing.
There was just a lot of like politics and weirdness and a lot of like, I think PMs get a bad rap.
But like when I say like PM culture, I think you all know what I mean. Like a lot of people who were sort of like justifying their existence by trying to accumulate power and not necessarily adding a ton of value.
And that just seemed like pervasive across web too. Um, and it kind of pushed me out because I
was not, when I was like early career, I was like not particularly good at like playing politics or
anything. Um, and so really joined crypto in geez end of 2017 yeah late 2017
and kind of i've been in this space ever since that's awesome and you are also spending some
time at the salon you know quite a bit of time on solana um is there any particular reasons like
why you ended up there or what you saw that was uh working so well yeah so where to start so i would say that like initially i you
know coming out of bison trails um i did not want to go and work for coin days it just big company
didn't seem like the right thing uh for me at the time and i was talking to a bunch of l2s
and a few other l1s um because i wanted to go work for like a proper protocol,
not just go work for, you know, Bison Trails was awesome,
but it was not like a protocol itself.
It was more of an infrastructure company
building to support blockchains.
And I kept having this thought,
like I'd worked on a bunch of ETH2 infrastructure
at Bison Trails because we were one of the first to support staking on the Beacon Chain.
I think we ran 67% of the ETH2 network at one point,
which was all, again, fine because it was pre-migration,
but it just shows you it was very hard to run infrastructure
in the early days for that.
And I kind of had this thing in the back of my head about,
well, how is the sharding
roadmap really going to work for DeFi? Like, are we going to have the Aave shard and the Uniswap
shard? And everyone's like, no, no, no, there'll be this like sync up bridge thing every 20 minutes,
it'll be fine. And I just, you know, composability always seemed like the killer feature for me
in DeFi. And so it was strange that the Ethereum community was kind of getting rid of composability
in favor of all these shards. And, you know, I was asking a bunch of people, I thought there's
something I was missing. Like, I thought I was dumb. Like, clearly, there's a lot of very smart
people working on this problem. Why are they not concerned about this problem? And I remember
getting on a call with, actually, a guy I used to work with, Ben Sparango, at Republic, I hired him
as like an intern or early job.
And he quit like two weeks later to go work for Masari, which is like a much better job.
But I hit him up and I was like, hey, I'm leaving, you know, Bison Trails.
I'm not doing the transition to them with Coinbase.
Like, who should I talk to?
I'm already pretty far along with all these folks.
He's like, you should talk to Raj and Tully.
And I was like, I don't know, man, like Solana,
like we worked with 50 protocols at Bison Trails.
I never worked with anyone from Solana.
And they're like, no, no, no, like just get on the call.
And so I remember asking Toli, I was like, look,
what am I missing about the ETH2 roadmap?
Like a lot of people are saying this is going to be incredible.
I have all these problems.
And he just kind of laughs and he goes, yeah, sharding sucks.
Like this is never going to work.
The composability is king.
We want to build one global state machine.
That is the only thing that matters is competition in market.
And I'd love to say I was clairvoyant and saw Sol going to 250 bucks someday.
But really my entire thought process was, I don't know if Toli is right here,
but I know I'm going to learn a hell of a lot over the next few years, even if Solana totally fails.
And that was the decision to go work for Solana.
And you've done amazing things for Solana, speaking all around the world.
You've onboarded, educated, but now you've gone and created Double Zero.
And from my understanding, I'm not a technical fox, but this is the future. As I've been told, this is the new internet. So how would you explain
your new project double zero and what you're trying to accomplish and build?
Yeah. So I am one of the three co-founders for double zero. And really what we're doing is going
back to first principles and rethinking the fundamental nature of the internet.
thinking the fundamental nature of the internet.
You know, just a kind of small objective there.
So the internet is incredible.
We obviously use it and love it every day,
but it was not built for the type of distributed systems that we have today.
It was built for centralized systems to talk to many different clients,
and it was built for centralized systems to talk to centralized systems.
This is the fundamental architecture of the internet.
It's really good at getting you to be able to log into Google or Facebook or join a Twitter spaces
sometimes. It's really not built for a high performance network of thousands of nodes
globally where the leader rotates every 1.6 seconds and you need two gigabits of connectivity
every time for that
to happen. And you have to propagate state out from one validator to 2000 validators around the
world to vote on consensus and achieve, you know, this thing we all know and love called the
blockchain. That's actually not something the internet's very good at. In fact, it's quite
bad at it. Like it's so bad at it that today the performance of the internet is by far the
limiting factor in all sorts of blockchain scalability, not just Solana. It's holding
Sui back. It's holding Aptos back. It's holding even centralized L2s are held back by the public
internet today. And so that really is the entire vision for why we started Double Zero was to look
at Solana able to do a million
transactions per second through fire dancer, or very close to that through agave on from the
client. And we look at the main net that's sitting at 7,000 TPS. And that's not demand limited,
that's supplied limited. That's weak. Currently, the software is not quite there. Well, it's not
there to be able to do that on the public internet,
and it will never be there to do that on the public internet.
You know, so we have two options, right?
We either, we take Solana and we make it a committee chain.
We shrink the validator set from 2000 to maybe 200 or 20,
and we put them all in the same data centers.
And that seems fairly antithetical
to the point of blockchain. And so instead, the question was, could we build a new infrastructure
layer that's fast enough that we can run a global consensus network in a million transactions per
second? And yeah, you're not going to have extremely small latencies because the speed of light is still your limiting
factor, but what you're going to have instead is one global market that moves as close to
the speed of light as possible.
And this is kind of a real paradigm shift because what everyone in centralized systems
today, which are what L2s are, are looking at is
how do we make the speed of time for the central processing system as slow as, as fast as possible,
which like, you know, it's one of those things where you think about it and you're like, okay,
sure. Like when, when people talk about latency, they're talking about what sort of is called
intrinsic latency. So you can think
about this as like, if you're playing a video game, I click the button on my mouse, how quickly
does the bullet actually fire from the gun in the game? On my local computer, right? The time it
takes my electrical signal to get from the mouse to the CPU for that thing to happen. That's like
intrinsic latency. And extrinsic latency is how long does it take for that action to be reflected on the multiplayer game server? Because when I click it, there's
always some sort of delay, right? And what everyone's optimizing for right now is the
speed from mouse click to CPU locally at my desk, registering that type of thing happening.
But the limiting factor, all the latency, 99% of the latency
comes from the propagation delay. It's my server talking to another server. It's my validator
talking to another validator. It's the time it takes to get from the software wallet to the
leader, wherever the leader happens to be in the world, going through RPCs and Stakeway to QoS and
all this other stuff that we know and maybe hate, but sometimes say we love, like
Stakeway to QoS and these types of systems.
And so that's the thing we are optimizing for.
It's the biggest limiting factor today in blockchain scale, and it's the single largest
source of latency on public blockchains.
Thank you for that overview, Austin.
And I can already think of all the implications that this could have. But, you know, speaking specifically, like for Solana, or even like for other blockchains, like, what would it look like towards the future as like projects, teams, blockchains move over to the double Z technology? And then also, we have a pop and we'll get to you in a second, FTO.
yeah i mean i think really what it's about if if we do our job correctly users have no idea that
stuff's running on double zero now all they know is things are faster things are better you know
that is at the end of the day like success for us is protocol developers having an entirely new
toolkit available to them and users just being like wow this is faster the same way solana today
is much faster than it was in 2021.
You know, users see that, but they don't really understand under the hood why it's faster.
And that's fine.
And even just recently we saw, and sorry to just double click on this, I'll go to you
in one second FTO, but we had saw there was a big problems with down, downages in like
AWS and Google cloud.
Do you see this as like big opportunities for double zero to come in or does this still things that we need to work and build towards
so it sort of depends like we don't really know at this point exactly what caused all of that big
outage right and so one of the things with private networks is they run parallel to the public internet. And that means that things that
happen on the public internet don't actually necessarily affect what's going on on private
systems. Now, if a Russian trawler cuts a fiber cable, sure, that's going to affect everyone
operating on it. But that's why we have multiple independent cables. But even if there's massive
congestion in the public internet, the double zero network really should be able to keep operating for the
most part in most jurisdictions, because it's running on parallel infrastructure. It's not
competing with the public internet for the same, you know, bytes of data that are moving through it.
Appreciate that. And let's go over really quick to one of our ambassadors, FTO, who has his pull up.
And if you guys have questions or anything that's going over your head, feel free to hit the comments. I'll be reading them as well as drop your TG and why you should like why you would be a great guardian. We'll be taking 10 to join at the end of the show. But FTO, you know, the whole performance test net ecosystem.
I'm not too familiar with kind of the ins and outs of it myself, but I have been, you know, kind of geeking out about it in a sense because I feel like it's really, you know, a good sentiment to move the ecosystem forward and kind of drive real, you know, use cases and attention to Solana in the right
way. So I'm really appreciative of what you guys are doing over there at DZ. But I guess my question
for you, Austin, is how do you guys see like a 9 or 10x in Solana's TPS kind of being achievable
with the congestion that comes along with it in those higher volume periods and those
kind of like web to native barriers yeah i mean this is what the fpga is in line are really
designed to address so we can do 100 gigabits per second of deduping of duplicate packets and
sig verifying packets as well and so what that means is when you see like the network
slowing down and going from 7000 tps to maybe like 700 tps around something like the trump airdrop
or not airdrop token launch what you're really seeing is um competition right and and that
competition is a result of validators receiving too many requests for them to really be able to
process and handle efficiently. Now, there are some things around single pipelining. And so
what you may see is like, you know, there's only 500 transactions per second of Trump coin buying
on, you know, one specific market, but everything else continues to work as intended. Part of what
happens now is the validators don't have enough resources to sort
through those periods of extreme activity. And that's kind of what we can do with the FPGAs by
offloading a lot of that work from them. So the options are basically like, oh, we could make
every validator extremely beefy and able to handle everything, but that's very capital inefficient.
Instead, we can embed these things in the network links and they can sort of do this on behalf of all the validators and for the first time you have resource sharing right
like what a novel concept on a blockchain currently when like think about this way when my validator
is building a block it is subject to the full force of the public internet and all the transactions
that want to come into it why is is that the case? We have 2000
validators out there that all could be helping defend the system, but because of the way we've
architected blockchain, that's not really possible. And that's kind of our goal with these FPGAs built
into the double zero network is they're not doing anything that I would call like, they're not
making any decisions, right? They're throwing out garbage that a validator could not even include in the block if it
wanted to, right?
If it includes a transaction with invalid signatures, it's going to lose all the rewards
from that block anyway.
So that's kind of the thing we're able to do here.
And that really will help alleviate a lot of these congestion issues that we see during
periods of high activity and allow
protocol developers to say, okay, we're going to go from 50 million CUs to maybe 200 million CUs.
That was a great question, FTO. And Marky just put his paw up also one of our ambassadors. We're
going to go one second, Marky, but I just wanted to ask Austin really quick, if you can expand on
kind of the onboarding process for validators and if that messes with the consensus, because I know if it, you know, for example, if any kind of update needed
to happen in the past, 80% needed to vote. So if some of them are on double zero, some aren't,
would this affect the network and validators? So we can only protect validators that are operating
on double zero, but there's no requirement for all validators to
operate on double zero, right? And so the idea here is like, it may be, you know, if protocol
developers and which they're doing right, Anza said they want to get to 200 million CUs by the
end of the year, I think they should set that target at 200 million CUs by the end of the year.
But you know, validators can certainly not operate on double zero. Now, they may find it actually economically cheaper to operate on double zero than not once the network
really starts to scale because we provide all these other sort of defensive services that
is useful for them. But there's certainly no requirement to operate on double zero by any
means. And just as a quick follow a quick follow because this also came in does
this also affect uh the the rewards for native stakers for epochs or possibly also for lst holders
with their yield bearing tokens over time yeah i mean the thing to remember here is if we're able
to double the number of cus or quadruple the number of CUs, that is something that will make everyone more
economic activity, right? And more money. And so sort of there's, there's been a little bit of like
zero sum thinking, I would say, um, from some validators and how they're thinking about this
type of thing. Like if I go to you and say, Hey, I'm going to double your salary, but you're going
to have to pay me 5% of that increase. Like every single person on the call would be like, yeah, sure,
I'll take that deal. But for some reason, that doesn't land that way for some validators.
And so look, we will not be assessing a fee if we are not at least generating the additional value
that our fee is, right? That's a very, very easy statement to say
and something we can sort of guarantee
the community here is like,
if we ask you to pay a fee to use double zero,
it's because you are making more than that fee
by using double zero.
I appreciate you expanding on that auction.
Awesome, thank you.
I want to pass it over to Marky,
one of our ambassadors who's got his paw up.
Go ahead, fam.
Yo, yo, good morning, good morning good morning man i you know with all these the quicks came up on some good points fto came up
on some good points and i have kind of a two-part question for you um but with validators and stuff
like that are you guys planning on you know launching a token for stakers is is there you
know is that in the horizon at all for for a token in the future
that's kind of my first question very simple one yeah i mean double zero is a token incentivized
network um so there there will be a token for the project uh you can read about a bunch of that on
some of the blog posts that we we have have put out i am not a big believer in airdrops i don't
really think they work that well for incentive alignment
or other types of, you know, uses, especially on infrastructure projects. Um, so we, we don't,
we, we candidly, we don't have any airdrops planned, um, you know, or anything along those
lines in part, because I don't think they're an optimal way to create incentive alignment.
Perfect. Perfect. Thank you so much for that answer. My second one
was, you know, if you guys, you know, kind of being that layer, are you guys planning on expanding to
multiple blockchains? Or you guys kind of making Solana home? Yeah, look, I mean, Solana is the
thing we are nailing first and foremost, it is the place where there's the highest demand, it's the
place where double zero makes the most sense. But the idea is kind of too good to just stop at one network. And so I think, you know, if we,
the thing that Solana has always been better than pretty much every other network at as the sort of
abundance mindset and the idea that like more fast blockchains create more fast products, right? To look around and say that,
like, you know, the landscape for Solana is worse today than it was in 2021, when Solana genuinely
had no competitors in 2021, right? It has competitors now. And that's actually good.
That makes everyone stronger and faster. And it also encourages people to build different types of protocols that come up with new great ideas.
And so, you know, our goal is to support all fast, high-performance distributed systems, both in blockchain and out of blockchain.
Great questions, Marky.
And I appreciate you asking about the token.
I was not going to go there, but our ambassador sure can.
to go there, but our ambassador sure can. So I appreciate you so much. Awesome. Now that we've
So I appreciate you so much.
Awesome.
gotten like a little bit dive underneath the hood, like let's talk about some of like the real world
implications these have, you know, like there's a lot of, you know, D-PIN projects and payment
processing has become huge on Solana with so many stable coins being minted. How does DoubleZero
affect, you know, like payment rails, for example, in like real world like use cases?
payment rails, for example, in like real world like use cases.
Yeah, I mean, double zero, it's an OSI layer one, two and three network.
So it's far below the smart contract layer.
It's far below the level in which blockchains like currently operate.
And so, you know, from that perspective, you can use double zero for anything.
It's sort of like asking like, oh, like what is Solana's impact on,
you know, the gaming space? And you're like, well, like it's a fast blockchain. So it,
you could build faster games. Right. I think it's the same thing when asking about like things like
payment rails, we're not specifically building anything that will service payment rails. We're
not specifically building anything to surface, uh, to serve DeFi or NFTs. We're building generic low-level frameworks
that are going to be very impactful for anything where you need increased bandwidth or you need
reduced latency. And so anything where timeliness matters or capacity matters is where 00 is going
to shine. And so that's kind of where, you know, if you have transactions that really need
to land quickly, like double zero is great for that. If you're Bitcoin, there's probably not
really much of a use case for double zero. And that's, that's fine. That's, we're not, you know,
trying to service everybody. We're focused on areas where latency is very important or capacity
is very important or both. And how, how are you guys going about like your onboarding process
as far as, you know, with validators and different networks and chains?
Are you guys doing more of a grassroots organic approach?
Are you talking with institutions?
And like, what are their feedback if you are getting any pushback
towards moving towards double zero?
So we, the way that validators connect,
maybe this is worth going over a little bit,
is if you're
operating in a data center close by 00 fiber, you just download this toolkit that runs in CLI,
and you basically create a tunnel into the 00 network. And then instead of talking out through
the public internet, you're talking out through the, you know, the double zero network instead.
And that's kind of, uh, the way someone connects in.
So it's quite easy.
It's a fully software-based solution at that point.
Um, and that's kind of that, that onboarding experience.
Um, sorry, I forgot the second part of your question.
Well, no, that was like, actually like pretty much, it was like more about like, yeah, the onboarding experience.
Um, but while we're actually like talking about like, well, it was more also like like what you guys are doing as far as onboarding.
Also, like if you had any like if you're coming upcoming events, I'm used to like seeing you speak at pretty much every Solana type eventing conference.
Yeah, we're look, we're heads down building, I would say.
building, I would say. And so, you know, my, my role as the one co-founder without kids is,
has been a lot of like conferences the last like few months. If you see me a lot of places,
that's kind of, that's kind of why engineers are busy doing engineering. And, you know,
we have a bunch of stuff coming up in the summer, right? We're bringing multicast to testnet in not too long. There's a bunch of other components there
that we'll all be rolling out.
And we're aiming for a launch, you know,
mid to late September,
but that's engineering dependent, right?
So some of those dates may slip
as all things do in crypto, you know,
but that's kind of our main focus.
The summer gets a little quieter from
a conference standpoint, but I think we'll have a lot of good stuff rolling out.
And it's also, your team seems like, well, first of all, let's talk about, I want to give shout
outs to your team. Shout out Eden, who was able to help coordinate this. And you guys are like
really stacked and ever growing. So what's it like working on the double zero team and what
opportunities might there be in the future
for any like builders, developers, listeners down there?
Yeah, I mean, we are basically,
we've taken an approach to really only hiring
like senior folks that could be
like almost like a department lead type role.
And part of this is it's a highly technical product.
It's quite complex.
And it's kind of built in a lot of different layers.
And so from that perspective, we really have been mostly hiring folks who are like experienced
network engineers, experienced blockchain engineers.
You know, we've got a few folks from the team listening in here, and they all kind of have
quite impressive resumes and backgrounds.
And so that's kind of been our our approach now there's a lot of other um ways people can get involved right we have a very uh active discord um there's tons of people who are writing awesome
content about double zero I'd say one of like my main philosophies is like we try and write like fairly complex,
heady content that then, you know,
people whose expertise is how do you communicate that out to a wide audience
or taking that and turning it into stuff in their own words too.
And I think that's kind of one of the cool things about this community that
we've built is like,
there's not actually that many people that can directly participate in our
community, right? It's not like an NFT people that can directly participate in our community, right?
It's not like an NFT project or a wallet
where, you know, anyone can download it and use it.
Like 00 really is like hardcore infrastructure
for those people building and operating blockchains.
But that being said, like this IBRL movement,
this vision for how do we build high-performance blockchain
and bring it to everybody,
that is really the goal and focus here. movement, this vision for how do we build high performance blockchain and bring it to everybody.
That is really the goal and focus here. And so, you know, we need a relentless drive from people who are, quite frankly, bag holders and community members of layer ones and layer twos to demand
high performance and to not settle for 7,000 transactions per second to instead be asking Trent, why not 70,000?
And talking about your team also,
you had recently sat down with an interview with Buffalo
and you had even posted about the duplicate packets
on Solana, like 80% of the traffic
and that you utilize a field programmable gate arrays.
Could you explain a little bit more on this
and why no one else has been using this
type of tech before? Yeah, certainly. So FPGAs have actually been used in TradFi and they've
actually been used in some areas for blockchain as well for a while. The difference I would say
with FPGAs is they require... So maybe just to start at the beginning, FPGAs sit somewhere in between the
performance of ASICs, so application-specific integrated circuits that you see in like Bitcoin
miners, and x86 processors or ARM processors that we all have in the computers we're using today.
They can't do as many things as your computer can, but they can do it much faster. And because the P in FPGA is programmable, so these are basically like hardware chips
that you can reconfigure after they've been manufactured.
And that's what makes FPGAs so powerful is they bring some of the performance of hardware
acceleration that you'd get from building a dedicated chip for something without the need to build a dedicated chip for something.
And so that's why we can use them for these very specific tasks,
like signature verification or transaction deduplification,
and they can be significantly faster than if the validator were just doing that themselves.
But you can't do as much on an FPGA as you can do on a server processor
or something like that,
but the stuff you can do,
you can do quite faster.
Now, are there any type of security issues
or concerns that you've had to overcome
or just kind of being real with users
that have kind of been pushbacks
or caused problems
during the development of 00?
Yeah, so we've basically, um, we've been gotten to the point now where a bunch of
this stuff is like starting to get phased into testnet. And that's kind of the point of testnet
is to test all this technology and prod. We've got about one and a half percent of Solana mainnet
stake running on the double zero testnet today, as well as even more from Solana testnet. And the things we learn through that process are
directly informing, you know, the rollout for mainnet as well. And also to double down on that,
a lot of Solana users and listeners have always been, you know, we've been anticipating Fire
Dancer to be coming very soon, hopefully. And does double zero work in tandem with Fire Dancer to be coming very soon, hopefully.
And does 00 work in tandem with Fire Dancer?
Or how is that going to, when it rolls out, how is 00 going to handle, like that also increased TPS?
Yeah, so we actually work with both the Agave and the Fire Dancer clients today.
Both have support for 00 on Testnet.
And so really what this is about is you can think of this as like maybe two or three
different staging problems here, right?
So the first one is if you run the software client in a fully centralized setting,
how performant is it?
And that's like not, that might sound like an obvious thing.
And oh, of course it should be fast.
But you go back to 2017, 2018, if you downloaded Geth and you ran it locally, like you really
couldn't get it above 300 transactions per second.
So the core limiting factor back then was even in a perfect situation, you can't get
it over 300 transactions per second.
This is sort of like when you go and you buy a Wi-Fi router
and they're like 3.7 gigabits per second of connectivity.
And you're like, why is my Zoom call stuttering?
It's like, well, that's in a perfect environment, right?
Like your house is very different.
If you're especially in an apartment,
all these other things fall into it.
So step one was how fast can you get Fire Dancer?
How fast can you get the Agave client in a testing environment, in a fully centralized
setting?
And today, for years, that number was like 10,000, 20,000, fairly low numbers.
But today, that number is near a million transactions per second for both software
clients.
And so once that's the case, you ask, okay, what's the next limiting factor?
Right?
And what's the next limiting factor, right? And what's the next limiting factor?
And there's been so much work on performance increases and bug fixes, both on the Anza
team and the Fire Dancer team over the last two years, that really the limiting factor
today is the public internet.
It's the connectivity between the validators.
It's no longer the software packages running on the validators.
And so that's kind of the way we think about this,
is it doesn't matter if it's Fire Dancer,
it doesn't matter if it's Agave.
You know, if one is 10 or 15% faster than the other,
it doesn't really matter because the internet
is limiting the performance of both by, you know,
a factor of 10 at the moment.
I appreciate you so much, Austin.
And also as a quickly friendly reminder,
Austin is hosting another AMA
this week with Double Zero. So if
any of these questions, I'm trying my best to
uncover as much as I can, but you can also
join their space. I pinned that up top, as well
as Austin went ahead and pulled up
some announcements. You can follow the Double Zero
official account. But before I dive into some more
questions, and the space gets too late, because as a
reminder to our team, we do have a call in 23 minutes as a sync call for
Apex Budapest. And you guys always like to wait to the last 10 minutes to start asking your
questions. So I'm going to check in with Professor Callahan and Maki really quick first, before it
gets too late in the show to see if you guys had any questions for Austin, while he's up here.
Professor, Maki, either you guys want to throw your paw?
Professor, Maki, either you guys want to throw your paw?
You guys are good?
Don't ask 10 minutes before the space ends with your paw
for questions.
This usually always happens with our big guests.
But Professor, what's your got?
Yeah, I was trying to be polite and actually let Maki speak
if we had anything.
But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, something got jammed on me so i couldn't
click on speak button so i was clicking like all the time on it um so what i wanted to ask
question this is kind of a bit out of the blue on on it but what is the thing that you look forward
to most once you reach the point where you're like, okay, this is now working. And like,
what's your place of happiness when you see people kind of using the product and enjoying it?
What's the point? How do you see it into the end goal of it?
Well, you know, we all die alone. So you have to make your own point along the way. Um,
no, but like, look, the, the, the point here is there's sort of two phases I would say that
we're dealing with here. The first one is fixing the capacity limitations currently preventing
Solana and other networks from hitting sort of their objectives, right? How do we get Solana up
to a hundred thousand transactions per second, a million transactions per second? The second networks from hitting sort of their objectives, right? How do we get Slana up to 100,000
transactions per second, a million transactions per second? The second phase is adding new features
and new capacity that are not possible today on the current system. And so, you know, you can think
of this as that first we have to scale, and the second is we add additional utilization. So things
that we can do, for example, is we could bring precision timing into the double zero network. So the second a packet
hits the network, it's timestamped. Now, what does that do? What does that allow people to do? Well,
you know, I can come up with a lot of ideas, but like, in all honesty, I think that's up to
folks who are building DeFi to say, if I had precision decentralized timing with 100% accuracy,
what can I build that I can't currently build? Does this change the way we think about maker
and taker flows in an AMM? Does this change the way we think about state updates in a club?
There's lots of potentials here. And I would never claim to say, I know the solutions to
these things, but I know that if we give people new toolkits to do new types of things, they're going to build really awesome new things in DeFi that like
I have never thought of and none of us at double zero have thought of.
Give the tools to the builders and let them build.
That's always what Ben Salama has been about.
So love to see that same mantra from double zero.
Uh, FTO had his paw up, but I want to go to professor really quick and then i'll go right back to you fto what's up professor yo yo yeah yeah i i i i didn't actually
have any questions like like i i was just trying to comment on how uh how i was uh waiting for that
moment that next revolutionary moment in the in basically an online space, not only in crypto or blockchain and so on. So basically now that Austin described this product or
basically this whole new momentum on the Internet, basically, it gave me
definitely that kind of vibe that I got when I first got into crypto back in 2020.
So yeah, just kudos for that.
And I simply can't wait to see what will happen next.
Awesome.
This is the future.
This is the new internet.
So get ready.
I appreciate you, Callahan.
Let's go over to FDO with his pop.
What you got, fam?
Appreciate it.
No, I like what Callahan said there.
I think that 00 has kind of been a movement for sure,
like in terms of it tying
into speed and uh accelerating on solana and whatnot it's it's really a good sentiment so
yeah i i agree with that wholeheartedly and i appreciate what you guys are doing but um
another question i kind of had was as as an innovator like primary innovator you would say
in decongesting solana what do you guys guys have, you know, on top of that
or that that can be reliant on to really sustain it for the long term?
So I guess, sorry, can you say a little bit more about, like,
where you see maybe an area there you want a little more info on.
Right. So I'm just wondering, like for competition, like if there's other, you know,
test nets where validators might be intrigued to go and kind of see what's going on there.
What do you guys have in terms of innovation that really makes you stand out in the long term?
I mean, there's no mo mode other than work in open source
software um that's kind of like the long-term mode is just our ability to keep scaling the
system and making it faster today we have no competitors i am sure we will have competitors
at some point um but you know the the the goal here is just to get to a level of build out where it's a very easy choice to say, oh, we're going to just use double zero when we need something like this.
And that is really kind of the focus here.
I think competition will be good for us.
I think, again, it'll be a thing that pushes the space to get even faster.
Our, you know, so our long-term reasons someone would use us as opposed to something else.
I mean, I can't really talk about a counterfactual because it's not like something else exists at the moment.
But I'm sure there will be networks at some point that decide like, hey, look, we can actually build our own double zero or something
like that just for our own use cases. And if it's a centralized system, that's totally fine.
Right. I mean, like Google has their own double zero, Amazon has their own double zero, you know,
jump trading as their own double zero, right? At the end of the day, like what we're doing is not
conceptually unheard of before. And if it's a good enough idea, other people will copy it. I think what we bring is credible neutrality, uh, multiple links into
different markets, like a lot of things where if you care about someone's
ability to censor you, you're gonna be very happy using double zero because
we have multiple contributors.
We have multiple independent pathways and you can't get that on traditional private networking, where it really is all run by one company.
Great question, FTO.
And also, I wanted to bring up the ambassador.
Ginju, I was literally about to ask your questions.
You asked a couple of really good questions in the comments, and a little technical.
So I'm glad that you got the mic and came up here because I'll let you ask Austin yourself, fam. Welcome
to Old Strong. Go ahead, fam. Yeah. So I was doing a little bit of a deep dive yesterday into the
whole double zero and I get it. I'm one of those who get it, like the two rings. So I wanted to
talk more about the filtering ring, the outer layer, about how it's eliminating span and where
the external validators and people
will come in and share their fiber. If you can go a little bit more into the information of that,
I kind of was tripping up on how would that look like in terms of sharing fiber and also what type
of mechanics or like systems would you be using for people to partake in your ecosystem?
Yeah, totally. So when we talk about the inner and outer ring,
these are, are not necessarily physical systems. They're more like logical systems in terms of
how you think about these components coming together. And so the idea here is every time
you are interfacing with double zero, you are going through a filtration system. And that system
is meant to protect everything downstream
from whatever something else might be trying to do, right? Whether that's send a bunch of spam
transactions or intentionally attack the network or something along those lines.
And that's where the FPGAs we were talking about before really come into their own and are really
useful in this system is it's about making sure that all this additional capacity 00 is bringing
is not taken up with garbage.
It actually can be used, you know,
to help advance these networks and make them faster.
That was a great question, Gintze.
Do you have any follow-ups?
Yeah, I just wanted to know, like,
what would that look in terms of, like,
the actual system itself that we would have to like procure to partake in your ecosystem?
What would that look like in terms of sharing fiber and whatnot?
Yeah, so this is really, you know, for folks who operate professional dedicated private networks.
And so, you know, we have some folks who have never done this before who are actually getting on board and
contributing fiber. But the same way that running a Solana validator required more CapEx and OpEx
than running an Ethereum validator, that is also a very similar system for us. And so this is really
the type of situation where an individual is not really providing connectivity to double zero.
It may be a company or a consortium of validators that team up and say, hey, we want to bring in, you know, a fiber line to this particular area that we are running in and we want to all share the cost and share the rewards.
But it's pretty price prohibitive for an individual to be doing.
Thank you so much for your time, Austin.
Sure.
Thank you, Ginzo, for coming up and asking those questions, man. I appreciate you so much. And I
know that we're starting to get towards the end of the show, Austin. I want to be conscious of
everyone's time. We also have a team meeting after this. But I tried my best to ask as many
questions as possible and get the Guardians ambassadors involved. But I tried my best, you know, to ask as many questions as possible and get the
Guardians ambassadors involved. But is there anything that we didn't get a chance to cover
today about double zero that you really wanted to hit home on or any call to action items that
you wanted to touch on for our listeners? Yeah, you know, I think the big the big thing here
is like, don't be happy with the performance of blockchains today. We can demand better.
We can build better.
It feels like we've maybe won or something along those lines.
But let's be honest, crypto is still a small, tiny fraction of TradFi.
And if we're going to compete with these folks,
we really need to be adopting the same types of low-level
based foundational technologies.
Because everything we're building so far,
all of the incredible work that's been done in crypto,
we've been doing the whole thing with a handicap.
That's kind of the entire thing.
We've been playing with a
hand behind our backs. If we start embracing the same type of high performance systems that you
use in TradFi, um, that is really the next generation of growth. That's amazing. We can
get faster. We can, and we will. I don't even know how that's possible, but Austin, I truly, truly appreciate you taking the time to come on our show today.
From like a personal Fox level, like you've been honestly like a hero of mine in the Solana ecosystem.
That's why I fan Foxed out and I ran up to you as you were enjoying the view at Istanbul for a photo.
But I truly do appreciate you coming up on stage and taking the time.
And you guys can also catch Austin later in this week at an A-May.
We pinned up top.
Also, I pinned up as well, Eden from the team who shout out,
made all this possible, posted up more on the articles on the economics.
So feel free to go up top and learn more.
Set your reminders for the AMA.
Austin, I appreciate you so much, fam.
Any closing messages for the builders out there?
Any inspirational words?
No, this is great.
Appreciate the time today.
And yeah, keep things going.
Thank you so much, Fam.
And because in the interest that we do have a call coming up with the team
just to keep you guys updated on our little SoulFlare escapades.
So hold strong every single week.
You already know.
We'll be starting the live streams.
Hopefully next week.
This week we should have everything finalized for getting all the overlays and everything all set up.
So expect SoulFlare streams to start really soon and we'll be able to do these deep dive AMA conversations with included product demos, which I feel is going to be really good content.
But we'll still be hosting these weekly hold strong spaces because it's an amazing opportunity to connect with our community and also invite new guardians.
So if you are trying to join the Guardians and you haven't already,
this is your opportunity.
This is your chance.
Walk through the door of it and drop your TG handle in the comments
as well as why you would make a great choice for a Guardian.
And we'll be adding you guys for the show.
As far as other updates from Soul Flare,
we just finished Startup Village with Super Team Balkan.
Absolutely amazing teams out here, amazing projects, and expect some more collaborations coming soon,
as well as some of that more Soul Strike game that you guys all love to see and play.
We are also going to be at Solana Apex Budapest coming up this next week.
So that's a big day event in Budapest.
If you guys are going to be in the area, make sure to stop by our booth.
We're going to have some merch for you guys always doing some cool stuff and then uh coming up later this year we also there was just an
announcement for island now coming up uh in greece from september 17th through october so you better
believe that this fox and soul flare is going to be out there as well and i believe that we also
have a presence at onion down but that's in chicago on the other side of the world right now
and this fox can't make it but if you guys are going to be at onion now appreciate you guys
showing up showing love and support for soul flare uh maki we have a big
interview dropping in a little bit uh probably later today or tomorrow we're just waiting on
the clearance from upper team management to make sure that it's not too much alpha but is there
anything that you wanted to share with the guardians while we had them this week uh as always As always, it's soon. It's closer than you think. It's going to happen.
And I think we...
I've chatted with a lot of people there and with Quix as well on Super Team Village and Split.
And they know certain things as well since we're close.
So they won't spill the beans.
And everyone is extremely, extremely excited
since they see what we're going to do with this community
and this change.
And when it comes to the interview, I think it's fine,
since even if we shared a bit too much,
it's still kind of just around the corner,
so people are going to be hyped.
Thank you for gaslighting the fox also, that now have the alpha now my dms are going crazy they're like quicks quicks please can we
get the alpha what's going on thank you i appreciate you maki uh needed that for the rest
of the day but guys this has been hold strong episode number 23 software does this every single
week highlighting amazing projects people building in the ecosystem. So if you guys missed this,
make sure to like and repost one more time
because the space is recorded
for our listeners around the world.
We appreciate all the love and support.
We're going to send out the link to the 10 guardians
that are joining our community right after this space.
So welcome, G4G, this is the way.
And as always, guys,
we appreciate all the love and support for Soul Flare.
Keep shining, keep being out there supporting,
and we're going to see you guys in the, well, soon to be Discord.
Right now, still TG.
But soon we'll be over in the Guardians Discord.
But we'll see everyone on the timeline at Solana Apex Budapest and at the Hold Strong 24 next week.
Much love, guys.
And here's your six-second delay because Elon Musk, man, he's launching rockets, building tunnels.
He gave us encrypted chats.
I don't know why we needed that. But he'll get to the six second delay whenever he feels
like it.
But until then, we'll see you guys at the next one.
Much love.
Thank you, Austin and Double Zero team so much.
Make sure that you're following Austin and Double Zero.
We appreciate you guys.
Thanks.
