Last month, we announced the deployment of a physical Point of Presence (PoP) in Frankfurt, a significant step in bringing DoubleZero’s vision of building a high-performance backbone for Solana and other distributed systems to life.
Today, we’re proud to share that the full connection between Frankfurt and our hometown, Prague, is now complete.
This milestone officially brings Prague online. Data is flowing through a private fiber line, connecting it to the DoubleZero network and delivering high speed to Prague.
Why This Matters
Validator routing is based on latency. That’s why DoubleZero’s first deployments shape real validator behavior, not hypotheticals. With the Prague line fully active, we’re already seeing validators route through the new endpoints, experiencing performance gains from dedicated, congestion-free bandwidth.
This connection isn’t theory— it’s visible and live for validators to connect through!
Why We Joined DoubleZero
RockawayX is proud to be the first European contributor to DoubleZero’s network.
As long-time Solana participants and infrastructure builders, we’ve always championed high-performance, decentralized systems and believed early on that decentralization must extend beyond validators to the networking layer itself.
We’ve configured our validator hardware, deployed bare-metal servers across regions, and optimized for high-throughput chains. Our expertise was proven when our infrastructure helped the Solana network sustain the Trump and Melania network surge, ensuring performance under extreme demand.
But global networking was the one piece of our stack we couldn’t fully own, forcing us to rely on third-party providers that limited our control. We’ve long been skeptical of Solana’s multiple concurrent proposer (MCP) model, not due to its design, but because the public internet’s instability and congestion create bottlenecks for such a precisely timed approach.
When we met the DoubleZero team in Singapore in 2024, their solution clicked. By directly connecting major hubs, DoubleZero eliminates public internet congestion, making MCP possible in the future. This was the missing layer we’d been waiting for.
Frankfurt, one of Europe’s most critical connectivity hubs, was the natural starting point. Home to major data centers, Deutsche Börse, and financial institutions, it’s a strategic location where blockchain operators already host nodes. Our first DoubleZero Device (DZD) was deployed there in early 2025, housed in the same data center as Deutsche Börse’s servers, with N+1 redundancy for power and cooling, full ISO compliance, and industrial-grade infrastructure.
After the conference, we collaborated closely with the DoubleZero team, aligning on IP addressing, iBGP routing configuration, and performance benchmarks to bring this vision to life.
Bringing Prague Online
Our next step was connecting Prague to the network via a private DWDM line from Frankfurt, achieving round-trip latency under 7ms. With this connection now live, we’ve established a full on-site presence in Prague to monitor relay performance 24/7/365, test validator behavior, and provide rapid feedback to continue to optimize the DoubleZero network.
We’ve published two new DoubleZero endpoints on-chain, enabling validators to discover and connect to them. Already, two users are connected to our Frankfurt switch, validating the success of this initial deployment.
Software and Infrastructure
DoubleZero’s network is designed to be validator-friendly and globally scalable. Validators discover DoubleZero Devices (DZDs) through on-chain smart contracts, which provide a list of active IPs of endpoints. The DoubleZero client automatically selects the lowest latency endpoint, enabling the fastest connection to the network.
But software is only half the equation. In crypto, we’re used to one-click deployments, but physical infrastructure demands months of coordination. We worked with data centers, fiber operators to align on long-haul fiber routes, failover readiness, and on-site standards. From N+1 redundancy to ISO-compliant facilities, every detail was engineered for real-world resilience.
The result is a validator-focused transport layer that delivers faster slots, fewer missed blocks, and almost zero congestion risk.
The Hardware That Powers It
The Prague–Frankfurt connection is powered by Arista DCS-7130LBR-48S6QD switches on both ends. These 1U machines are marvels:
- Low-latency L2 switching
- L1 wire-speed switching via integrated Crosspoint
- Custom Linux distribution for custom agent deployment
- Two Xilinx Virtex® UltraScale+™ VU9P-3 FPGAs for edge filtration
- Broadcom Jericho2 switch chip (ASBR grade chip)
We configured the networking layer in-house—uplinks, out-of-band access, BGP sessions, MTU settings, and more. On the user-facing side, the DoubleZero agent manages tunneling (GRE) to access provisioning, allowing validators to connect seamlessly.
What’s Next
This Prague connection is part of a broader rollout. Next, we’re building 100G links throughout Europe, linking more European locations to the DoubleZero highway and unlocking greater validator performance.
If you’re running high-throughput validators or building in a performance-sensitive environment, DoubleZero is what you’ve been waiting for.
Connect with us at https://rockawayx.com/contact.
If you’re looking to connect to the DoubleZero network, you can fill in the connect form here: https://doublezero.xyz/connect
