Former Solana Executive Utilizes Wall Street Strategy to Promote Fairness in DeFi

Austin Federa, the former head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, left his position in 2024 to tackle the issue of unfairness in the cryptocurrency trading environment. Eighteen months later, his company, DoubleZero, claims to have a solution. The company's private fiber network aims to eliminate the competitive advantage that traders gain from being physically closer to an exchange's servers, creating a more level playing field. However, regulators and traders have yet to express interest in this technology. According to Federa, the problem lies in the fact that the crypto industry often confuses decentralization with distribution. While DeFi protocols are decentralized due to their open-source code and permissionless validator sets, the laws of physics cause validators to cluster in the same data centers, giving some traders a millisecond-based edge over others. For instance, traders based in Tokyo enjoy a 200-millisecond advantage over their international counterparts on platforms like Hyperliquid. Federa argues that this issue is not new, as traditional finance has already addressed it. The New York Stock Exchange developed its Mahwah, New Jersey data center over a decade ago, implementing cable-length equalization to within a nanosecond to prevent asymmetric access. DoubleZero's solution involves timestamping, which aggregates private bandwidth from operators to route blockchain data over dedicated links. This allows venues to timestamp orders across global entry points and reconstruct a fair sequence, similar to the cable equalization used by the NYSE. The challenge is not only speed but also verifiability, as traders have no way to distinguish between ordinary network congestion and deliberate actions on a venue running over the public internet. DoubleZero's managed network with deterministic latency makes it possible to prove the distinction. While physics still applies, and a New York trading desk routing through DoubleZero to reach Hyperliquid in Tokyo will not outrun a nearer competitor, the gap and variance shrink. Traders get lower and more predictable latency, which is what high-frequency trading firms pay for in traditional markets. Federa's point is that crypto is misinterpreting what makes traditional markets fair. Regulators are important, but they are not the primary drivers. Instead, exchanges themselves work to maintain fairness because their business depends on it. If a venue gains a reputation for asymmetric access, it loses volume to venues that do not. The latency problem in DeFi is not waiting on regulators but rather on the moment a major venue decides that fairness is a competitive advantage worth paying for. The next decade will test whether anyone is willing to build distributed systems, where the advantage is not based on the location of a server. As Federa said, 'No one wants to trade on an unfair platform.'