DoubleZero Foundation has launched Edge, a public beta that aims to bring Wall Street-style market-data infrastructure to Solana by delivering raw block data over a private, multicast-enabled global fiber network — bypassing the public internet and shaving about 6 milliseconds off average delivery times.
What Edge does
- Edge streams the exact UDP packets emitted by the Solana leader — raw block shreds — before any third-party processing or decoding. Subscribers receive the unprocessed data and handle reconstruction, decoding, and trading logic on their end.
- The service launched Thursday with 379 validators actively publishing shreds to the network.
- Access is permissionless and billed in USDC per device per epoch (an epoch on Solana lasts roughly two days). Introductory city-based pricing runs from $30 to $100 per epoch through May 2026.
Why this matters
Solana’s block data currently traverses the public internet, introducing unpredictable latency and forcing market participants to stitch together APIs, RPC nodes, and CDNs with inconsistent performance. Edge replaces that route with multicast over dedicated fiber: a single stream is sent once and replicated by the network to all subscribers in one hop from the Solana leader. That eliminates relay trees and positional advantages between participants, producing an average 6 ms improvement in delivery — and larger gains during peak network activity, when millisecond differences matter most to high-frequency traders and market makers.
Economic incentives and distribution
Edge creates a new economic layer for validators and network operators:
- Revenue split per epoch: 50% to network contributors who supply fiber links, 32.5% to validators originating shreds, 17.5% to protocol clients.
- An additional 10% of revenue is used to burn the protocol’s native token.
This provides validators with incremental, low-latency revenue streams independent of block rewards and staking yields.
Roadmap and broader context
DoubleZero plans to extend Edge beyond Solana shreds to include centralized exchange feeds, prediction market data, and traditional order-by-order exchange data — aiming to become a unified data layer bridging on-chain and off-chain markets. That ambition dovetails with Solana’s 2026 upgrade roadmap, which includes the Alpenglow consensus overhaul targeting ~150 ms finality and the Firedancer client aiming for over one million transactions per second.
Backing and origins
DoubleZero raised $28 million in March 2025 from Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital. The project is co-founded by Austin Federa, formerly head of strategy and communications at the Solana Foundation, giving it close ties to the network’s infrastructure community. Co-founder Andrew McConnell summed up the pitch: “Traditional finance has spent decades building infrastructure where speed and deterministic performance are a real competitive advantage. On-chain markets didn’t get that foundation, which left even sophisticated trading firms working on uneven ground.”
Why institutions will watch
Edge is the first dedicated market-data distribution product on a major Layer-1 blockchain to explicitly mirror the direct-feed model used by Bloomberg and Reuters. For institutional trading desks and latency-sensitive market makers, that can change the competitive calculus of operating on-chain — especially as Solana’s DEX activity grows (five Solana-native protocols now sit in the global top 10 by daily trading activity).
Bottom line
Edge targets a longstanding structural gap between traditional market infrastructure and on-chain venues by offering a low-latency, deterministic feed for Solana block data. If adoption widens — among validators, trading firms, and other data providers — Edge could become a foundational layer for professional-grade on-chain market access.
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