Austin Federa quit as the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy in 2024 to tackle what he saw as unfairness in the crypto trading environment. Eighteen months later, his company, DoubleZero, says it’s ready.

DoubleZero aims to eliminate proximity to an exchange’s servers as a competitive advantage for traders. The private fiber network removes latency, the time it takes for an order to reach the platform from a trader’s desk, as a factor and introduces a more equitable environment even though regulators — and traders — aren’t asking for it yet.

The problem, Federa says, is that crypto conflates decentralized with distributed. DeFi protocols are decentralized by virtue of their open-source code and permissionless validator sets, but…