How did DoubleZero ignite the market? Solana extends from DePIN to tell the new narrative of N1.

Author: Frank, PANews

On October 2nd, a project named DoubleZero ignited a "flash battle" for listing coins in the crypto world. On that day, its mainnet testnet officially launched, and its native token 2Z almost simultaneously landed on multiple global exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, and Upbit, at an unprecedented speed. The market's enthusiastic response was beyond imagination, with the 24-hour trading volume of the 2Z token once exceeding $1.4 billion, and its circulating market capitalization rapidly climbing to over $2 billion, making it into the top 100 crypto assets.

This wave is not without reason. Before and after the project went live, the Solana ecosystem endorsed it with unprecedented strength, as not only did its co-founder publicly express congratulations, but the network also attracted over 300 Solana validator nodes upon launch, capturing a significant portion of the network's staking share. Even more noteworthy are the breakthroughs it achieved in compliance: just days before the token launched, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a historic "No-Action Letter" to DoubleZero, confirming that the programmatic distribution of the 2Z token does not need to be registered as a security. This action was interpreted by the market as a "bright green light" from regulators, significantly alleviating compliance concerns across major exchanges. Even Coinbase, known for its strict compliance requirements, announced the launch of the perpetual contract for the project token 2Z on October 3.

What makes an emerging infrastructure project achieve such top-level resource allocation and market recognition right from its launch? What is the magic behind this project called DoubleZero? PANews will delve into the team, technology, narrative, and potential dilemmas behind it.

Solana**-based DePIN**** New Star**

From its inception, DoubleZero has had the potential to be a star project.

First, there is a luxury founding team composed of industry elites, and the core leadership of DoubleZero can be regarded as a continuation of the "Solana Think Tank". Its co-founder and CEO Austin Federa was the head of strategy and communications for the Solana Foundation and is one of the key figures in promoting the early rise of the Solana ecosystem; Chief Operating Officer David McIntyre was the head of financial planning and analysis at the Solana Foundation; co-founder and CTO Andrew McConnell is also a co-founder of Malbec Labs; Chief Economist Nihar Shah was the head of data science at Mysten Labs and held key positions at Jump Crypto and in Meta's Libra/Diem project.

In addition to a strong team background, its narrative claims are relatively unique. DoubleZero introduces and defines a new category of protocol - "N1" (Network 1). This positioning strategically distinguishes it from common L1 (consensus layer), L2 (scalability layer), or L3 (application layer) protocols. According to its design philosophy, N1 provides the network layer, L1 provides consensus on top of it, and L2 provides scalability.

In simple terms, N1 is designed to create a dedicated high-speed network for existing blockchain networks. This narrative cleverly avoids the fiercely competitive tracks and can essentially be categorized under the DePIN domain. Its potential space, apart from the crypto field, may also cover all areas that require distributed networks in the future, such as content delivery networks (CDN), large language models (LLM), and real-time gaming.

The dazzling team combined with a highly promising narrative structure has also attracted the favor of capital for DoubleZero. In March 2025, the project announced that it had completed a round of token financing of $28 million, with a post-investment valuation reaching $400 million. This round of financing was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, with participation from several well-known institutions including Foundation Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, and Borderless Capital. The two co-founders of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, also participated as angel investors.

Build "Infrastructure" for Blockchain Infrastructure

The technical core of DoubleZero is its innovative "dual-ring" architecture, consisting of the outer ring (Ingress/Egress Ring) and the inner ring (Data Flow Ring).

In simple terms, the main goal of DoubleZero's narrative is to build a highway separately outside the current chaotic public internet. This highway independently serves blockchain networks such as L1 and L2, achieving low latency and minimal congestion. The design of the outer ring can be understood as a smart security inspection system, similar to the effect of a toll station on the highway. Through this design, all data entering the core network undergo "cleaning" and "preprocessing."

The inner ring can be understood as the road of this highway. The clean traffic that has been "cleaned" by the outer ring will be directed into the inner ring, this high-performance core. The inner ring is a physical network backbone composed of dedicated fiber optic links provided by independent contributors worldwide. In short, DoubleZero **'s technical principle is to construct a dedicated "information highway" with intelligent security checks for distributed systems through the "combination of software and hardware" and the design of "separation of inner and outer rings," thus addressing the current network bottlenecks that limit blockchain performance at the physical layer.

Compliance, narrative, and implementation aspects have potential

In summary, the potential of the DoubleZero project is reflected in the following points.

1. Narrative Potential: In addition to the original "N1" concept, the biggest feature of this narrative is not only that it jumps out of the "public chain competition" red sea, but also cleverly turns all public chains into potential clients. Moreover, as the underlying layer of a distributed system, its narrative potential may further expand into hotter and more promising fields like AI in the future.

2. Technical implementation: Unlike many projects that remain at the white paper stage, DoubleZero has already achieved real physical infrastructure operations. As of October 3rd, its official number of public internet nodes has exceeded 1,300, with more than 330 participating Solana network validators.

3. Resource Capability: In fact, the success of the token 2Z launched by DoubleZero showcases the project's ability to integrate industry resources. On October 3rd, at the very beginning of the token's launch, it almost simultaneously listed on all major global exchanges, including Binance, Kraken, Upbit, etc. Furthermore, with the strong endorsement from Solana's official support and the active participation of the validator system, DoubleZero was able to generate significant market response without conducting any airdrops.

4. Compliance Capability: The mature compliance capability demonstrated by DoubleZero is a rare advantage among past new crypto projects. Before its launch, it received a "no-action letter" from the U.S. SEC, which stated: "If the 2Z token is distributed programmatically as described, the SEC will not recommend enforcement action, and the 2Z token does not need to be registered as a security." Additionally, PANews noted that DoubleZero's token 2Z set a record for being the first token sale open to U.S. qualified investors on CoinList since 2019 when it was sold earlier this year. Its compliance capability may also be a "pass" that allows it to be listed quickly on exchanges with higher compliance requirements like Coinbase and Upbit.

Is the C** end too far away, and can the market enthusiasm be sustained?**

Even with the aforementioned multiple potential advantages, the price performance of DoubleZero's token on its first day of launch did not show a sustained increase. In addition to the weak rise caused by high valuation and high opening, the lack of any community airdrops that have been criticized by the community also reflects the current situation where DoubleZero is too close to institutions and too far from the community.

First of all, from the characteristics of the project itself, although this project is a DePin type project, it has a high threshold, requiring participants to possess specialized network facilities such as proprietary fiber optics and data center rooms. This directly excludes ordinary players. In addition, the narrative is too vertical; compared to public chains like L1 and L2 that can produce a large number of application layer projects to drive the ecosystem, DoubleZero's main advantage may be to connect more public chain facilities. Overall, the characteristics of DoubleZero itself determine that it is closer to the B-end and further from the C-end.

In addition, DoubleZero does not place enough emphasis on the C-end in its operational thinking. On one hand, the project has not proposed a plan for testnet users to participate in airdrops. Even the token presale on Coinlist is aimed at institutional users at the validator level. Although they launched the "HODLer Airdrop" in cooperation with Binance, this model has not generated much discussion in the market and is not a gesture of thanks to its community users.

Therefore, the discussion about DoubleZero in the community is not very enthusiastic. Its token price quickly fell back to around $0.51 after reaching a high of $1.28, with a maximum drawdown of nearly 60%.

Overall, the launch of DoubleZero is undoubtedly a stunning appearance. From the perspective of project development, it proposes a new development approach and narrative structure. This has a certain enlightening effect on the future development of the cryptocurrency market. If the project itself develops as expected, it may also become a new giant in the DePIN track. However, from the perspective of the cryptocurrency market, the operational thinking and product characteristics of this project are destined to be far from C-end users, and the most direct way for users to participate is to speculate on the value of its tokens. Clearly, this is also its main flaw, and the future value may still depend on whether its B-end business can continue to expand.