Decentralization Meets Tradition: Exploring DoubleZero’s Edge in Financial Infrastructure

Well joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange this morning is Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me first and foremost for our viewers out there in a nutshell, can you explain what Do short Doro is a physical fiber infrastructure network, but it's built with a lot of blockchain principles.

In mind.

So this is the same type of high performance data delivery network that ICE, Bloomberg, all these market data feed organizations run, except it's run by multiple independent contributors and it's built for this new generation of finance.

And speaking of this new generation of finance, tell us about Edge.

Edge is a market data delivery platform.

Instead of traditional markets where there's one centralized matching engine and you're sourcing data from one location, Edge has to source data from thousands of different validators all around the world.

It's like if the New York Stock Exchange moved every one.

0.6 seconds.

So you take what is a pretty standard data problem traditional finance has been solving for years and you apply the decentralization and permissionist nature of blockchain and new finance to it and things get much more complicated.

So we built double zero edge from the ground up to solve that problem.

And while I have you here, we're smack dab in the middle of 2026 and it has been quite the year we've heard of a lot of announcements between Trad as well as Defi.

So what do you make of the market environment right now?

Yeah, it's quite interesting.

We are seeing for the first time this integration of both crypto and new finance and traditional finance together.

Polymarkets yesterday or a few days ago with the news about NYSE and ICE teaming up for pre-markets.

Very interesting.

What crypto really gives you and what new finance gives you is a larger distribution and data access layer, and it sits alongside traditional finance.

I think there's a lot of room to work together and you see a lot of really interesting things happening in perps and other types of financial products that don't really exist in the traditional market.

Of which we've seen plenty of volatility in the broader markets this year and that has been the same across all asset classes whether we're talking about equities or commodities, the crypto market or even in the bond or FX market.

So some of this volatility, what do you make of a potential 24/7 global cycle?

Yeah, I mean this is the thing that traders love.

Volatility is where money is made in addition to bull markets.

But when you're thinking about highly volatile assets, you need the same type of high quality data infrastructure that traditional markets have built out for traditional stock exchanges.

What we saw on 1010 in the crypto flash crash is the markets have very poor information flow.

They're very poorly arbitraged.

Price discovery is fragmented, and part of what Double Zero Edge does is give traders the tools to close that data asymmetry.

And for viewers out there who may not be as familiar, you mentioned infrastructure here, so give us the lay of the land.

Where are we right now and what are some of the challenges?

Yes, so traditional finance has run on dedicated physical infrastructure for a generation at this point, but everything that's happening in this new class of finance, whether that is Coinbase and Binance or polymarkets and Calci and sports betting and blockchains like Salana and Ethereum, still runs over the public internet.

And the public internet is an incredible resource, but it lacks the determinism and the sort of SLAs and the standard performance that you would expect for a high performance financial system that is running a huge amount of the world's transactions nowadays.

And so it's really time in our view at 00 to upgrade that infrastructure and learn from the successes in traditional finance while bringing it to the market paradigm of new finance.

And we are counting down to the opening bell here at the New York Stock Exchange.

There is an IPO today.

That's why we're hearing a lot of this cheering behind us.

But when we look ahead, not just to the second half of 2026, but also beyond, given what you're seeing in this space, what are your expectations and what does it mean for the everyday American that's watching right now?

Yes, the regulatory changes we've seen over the last 12 months are substantial.

If we see clarity actually passing this year as well, this brings sort of an easier way to engage with this whole new.

Financial infrastructure model for traders.

We see already that crypto assets are becoming standard in ETFs and digital asset treasury companies and other vehicles.

So I think what we're seeing is just expanded market access.

I'm a big believer in market access and that investors, both retail and institutional, should have access to the same types of high grade information and high grade financial products.

And Austin, finally, before I let you go, we have about 60 seconds.

So what season do you think we are when it comes to the broader crypto market?

You know, it's always hard to predict market cycles.

What I would say is the fundamentals are stronger in the industry than I've ever seen them.

And you know if you believe things trade on fundamentals, that should be a pretty good outlook.

Well, it sure does feel like summer out there here in New York City with the heat wave, but we will have to see what happens when it comes to crypto.

So I appreciate your time today, Austin.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Thank you.