Code Story episode
S11 E5: The Public Internet Bottleneck: Rebuilding the Physical Routing Layer for High-Performance Blockchains with Austin Federa, Co-Founder of DoubleZero
Jun 24, 2025 · Season 11 · Episode 5 · 29 min
Building a new internet to fuel the blockchain
Austin Federa has a non-traditional path into the blockchain world. In college, he studied political & environmental science, and economics. Interestingly enough, those studies map a lot to the blockchain first principles. He was seriously looking to do his PhD, but fell out of love with that space, and joined NPR as a journalist for a while. Then, of course, he got bit by the startup bug. Outside of tech, he enjoys living in Brooklyn, photography, and engaging in some form of learning at all times. He enjoys reading, mention the Children of Time series, as though it was fiction, it had a lot of interwoven psychology and communal themes.
Austin acknowledges that though we all love the internet, it's actually not very good... for high performant systems. And though companies are trying to build dedicated networks in the world, there hasn't been one created for blockchain - IE, not centralized around single party.
This is the creation story of DoubleZero.
Sponsors
Paddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearch
Links
https://doublezero.xyz/https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-federa/
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