In Solana news today, DoubleZero Foundation launched Edge, a public beta platform that delivers raw Solana block data through a private global fiber network using multicast, bypassing the public internet to cut average delivery times by 6 milliseconds — the same data distribution standard that traditional exchanges have used for decades.
Summary
- Edge launched with 379 validators publishing shreds, covering approximately 43% of Solana’s total stake, with Jito, Triton, Staking Facilities, and Harmonic participating as initial launch partners.
- Traders subscribe in USDC per device per epoch, with prices from $30 to $100 depending on city, while revenue splits 50% to network contributors, 32.5% to validators originating shreds, and 17.5% to protocol clients, with 10% going to a protocol burn mechanism.
- DoubleZero, co-founded by former Solana Foundation communications director Austin Federa, raised $28 million in March 2025 in a round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital.
In Solana news today, DoubleZero Foundation launched Edge, a public beta platform that delivers raw Solana block data through a private global fiber network using multicast, bypassing the public internet and cutting average data delivery times by 6 milliseconds compared to conventional routing. The service went live Thursday with 379 validators actively publishing shreds.
The data subscribers receive is raw — the same UDP packets emitted by the Solana leader before any third-party processing. Reconstruction, decoding, and strategy logic remain on the subscriber’s side. Access is permissionless; payment is in USDC per device per epoch, approximately every two days.
Solana’s block data currently travels over the public internet, introducing unpredictable latency, forcing trading firms to piece together combinations of APIs, RPC nodes, and CDN connections with varying performance ceilings. Edge replaces that path with multicast. A single stream is sent once and replicated at the network level, reaching all subscribers in one hop from the Solana leader with no relay tree and no positional advantages between participants.
The 6-millisecond gain is an average. During peak network activity — the conditions that matter most to high-frequency trading firms and market makers — the advantage from dedicated fiber compounds. Solana’s growing DEX volume has already placed five Solana-native protocols in the global top-10 by daily trading activity. Traders competing in that environment operate on execution margins where milliseconds translate directly to profitability.
DoubleZero co-founder Andrew McConnell stated the case plainly. “Traditional finance has spent decades building infrastructure where speed and deterministic performance are a real competitive advantage,” he said. “On-chain markets didn’t get that foundation, which left even sophisticated trading firms working on uneven ground.”
The Validator Revenue Model
Validators earn additional income by publishing shreds to Edge, creating a direct economic incentive for consistent, low-latency data publication that operates independently of block rewards and staking yields. Current subscription prices run from $30 to $100 per epoch depending on the city through May 2026. Revenue is distributed each epoch: 50% to network contributors who supply fiber links, 32.5% to validators originating shreds, and 17.5% to protocol clients. An additional 10% burns the protocol’s native token.
DoubleZero plans to expand Edge’s data coverage beyond Solana shreds to include centralized exchange feeds, prediction market data, and traditional exchange order-by-order data, positioning the platform as a unified data layer across on-chain and off-chain markets. That ambition sits directly within Solana’s broader upgrade narrative for 2026, which includes the Alpenglow consensus overhaul targeting 150ms finality and the Firedancer client targeting over one million transactions per second.
The Institutional Context
DoubleZero raised $28 million from Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital in March 2025. The project is co-founded by Austin Federa, who previously served as head of strategy and communications at the Solana Foundation, giving it direct lineage to the network’s infrastructure development community. The launch of Edge beta marks the first time a dedicated market data distribution product has gone live on a major Layer-1 blockchain in a format that explicitly mirrors what Bloomberg and Reuters-style direct data feeds provide in traditional markets — a gap that institutional trading firms have cited as a structural disadvantage of on-chain venues since DeFi began competing for institutional flow.
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