Public internet infrastructure is the critical speed and performance constraint on high-throughput blockchain networks, according to Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero, a project developing high-speed fiber optic communication rails for blockchains.

“The downside of the public internet is it was never built for high-performance systems. It was always built for this sort of relationship of one big server talking to one little server,” Federa told Cointelegraph in an interview at Consensus 2025. The executive explained:

“We have validators all around the world. Rotating leader schedules all the time. And then they switch from having to be massive consumers of data to extremely massive broadcasters of data. So that means that they need huge amounts of resources both on ingress and egress.”

The executive added that the constraint posed by public internet infrastructure is now the limiting factor in blockchain performance and not compute power or software development.

Austin Federa giving a presentation on DoubleZero at Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Canada. Source: Cointelegraph/Vince Quill

Networks like DoubleZero will make blockchains faster, decrease spreads in decentralized finance (DeFi) trades, lower transaction fees, and open up new use cases for blockchain networks that were previously unavailable due to communication infrastructure constraints.

Related: Blockchains ready for institutions, lawyers hesitate: DoubleZero CEO

DoubleZero co-founded by Austin Federa in 2024

Austin Federa left the Solana Foundation to establish the DoubleZero Protocol in December 2024. The goal of the project is to reduce latency, the time it takes for data to travel in a network, and bandwidth — the maximum data traffic a network can handle at once.

In April 2025, DoubleZero conducted a validator token sale to sell token purchase agreements to interested node operators seeking to become validators for the network.

The token sale was only available to accredited investors and already active validators on high-throughput blockchain networks including, Solana, Celestia, Sui, Aptos, and Avalanche.

Cover page for the DoubleZero whitepaper. Source: DoubleZero

DoubleZero’s team is aiming to launch its public mainnet in the second half of 2025, following a successful $28 million capital raise.

Federa told Cointelegraph that the increasingly high throughput of blockchain networks and the overall development of the industry has necessitated the building of dedicated, high-performance communication infrastructure to meet demand from increasingly sophisticated projects.

Magazine: What are native rollups? Full guide to Ethereum’s latest innovation

Moody’s credit rating agency downgraded the credit rating of the United States government from Aaa to Aa1, citing the rising national debt as the primary driver behind the reduction in creditworthiness.

According to the May 16 announcement from the rating agency, US lawmakers have failed to stem annual deficits or reduce spending over the years, leading to a growing national debt. The rating agency wrote:

“We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from the current fiscal proposals under consideration. Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat.”

The credit downgrade is only one degree out of the 21-notch rating scale used by the company to assess the credit health of an entity.

An overview of the US national debt. Source: US National Debt Clock

Despite the negative short to medium-term credit outlook, Moody’s maintained a positive outlook on the long-term health of the United States, citing its robust economy and the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency as strengths, reflecting “balanced” lending risks.

Related: Asia’s wealthy shifting from US dollar to crypto, gold, China: UBS

Investors react to Moody’s US credit revision

Moody’s announcement drew mixed reactions from investors and market participants, leaving many unconvinced by the agency’s revised outlook.

Gabor Gurbacs, CEO and founder of crypto loyalty rewards company Pointsville, cited the rating agency’s previous credit assessments during times of financial stress as unreliable, signaling that the outlook was too optimistic.

“This is the same Moody’s that gave Aaa ratings to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities that led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis,” the executive wrote in a May 17 X post.

However, macroeconomic investor Jim Bianco argued that the recent Moody’s credit outlook does not reflect a real downgrade in the perception of US government creditworthiness and characterized the announcement as a “nothing burger.”

Interest rates on the 30-year US Treasury Bond spiked to nearly 5% in May 2025, signaling reduced long-term investor confidence in US debt. Source: TradingView

US government debt surpassed $36 trillion in January 2025 and shows no signs of slowing, despite recent efforts by Elon Musk and others to reduce federal spending and curtail the national debt.

As the debt climbs and investors lose faith in US government securities, bond yields will spike, causing the debt service payments to go up, further inflating the national debt.

This creates a vicious cycle as the government will have to entice investors with ever-greater yields to incentivize them to purchase government debt.

Magazine: Elon Musk’s plan to run government on blockchain faces uphill battle

Michael James, the head of institutional business development at Douro Labs — the company that developed the Pyth high-speed blockchain oracle network — told Cointelegraph that oracle networks like Pyth are disrupting the $50 billion financial data industry that provides critical price information to exchanges, brokerages, trading firms, and other institutional entities.

In an interview at Consensus 2025, the executive said that Pyth Network’s data pull model sets it apart from traditional pricing oracles, allowing customers to pay for data on demand, reducing costs for institutions reliant on real-time market data.

Differences between pull and push models in oracle systems. Source: Pyth Network

According to the executive, the financial data industry is currently monopolized by around eight major providers that continually raise prices on clients arbitrarily. James added:

“These data vendors have no competition in traditional finance, and so they have all the pricing power in the world. There is no substitutability; whether you are a banker or hedge fund and you are trading more or less — you still have to buy that data for compliance reasons.”

The high costs of financial data stifle innovation and prohibit small to medium-sized businesses from taking part in the global financial services industry, further concentrating the sector in the hands of a few large players and preventing novel use cases from emerging.

Related: Asset tokenization expected to speed capital flows, says Chainlink’s Nazarov

Pyth experiences significant growth in 2024

The Pyth oracle network provides real-time market data and price feeds for cryptocurrencies, equities, foreign currency exchange markets (FOREX), commodities, and rates.

In December 2024, Pyth announced the launch of real-time oil pricing data on over 80 blockchain networks.

The real-time oil price feeds track data from West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent Crude Oil, aggregating the data from multiple sources and clearing the path for energy derivatives instruments and energy trading to take place on blockchain rails.

A breakdown of market share between blockchain oracle providers. Source: DeFiLlama

Throughout 2024, Pyth network increased its total value secured (TVS), a metric that tracks the amount of capital secured by an oracle network, 46-fold.

According to data from DeFiLlama, Pyth currently commands roughly 11.3% of the blockchain oracle market, up from the approximately 10.8% in market share reported in September 2024.

Magazine: Ethereum is destroying the competition in the $16.1T TradFi tokenization race