Inside DoubleZero Edge: How Malbec Labs Brings Private Network Performance to Solana Traders

At the end of a live demo of DoubleZero's public data dashboard, Ben Marx pulled up a comparison between the DoubleZero network and the public internet. The figures on screen showed round-trip time improvements ranging from 4 milliseconds to 55 milliseconds depending on the route. "If you can get a 60% improvement over your competition," Marx said, "there's a lot of room for you to make a lot of decisions there. If you're saving 55 milliseconds, that's like a low-earth orbit ping in terms of time saved."

"Let It Crash"

Marx, Head of Engineering at Malbec Labs (the core contributors to DoubleZero), came to distributed systems through Elixir. He co-authored "Adopting Elixir" alongside Jose Valim, the language's creator, and Bruce Tate. Before that, he spent several years at Bleacher Report, a sports media company he describes as the second largest in the world by users, where Elixir was processing around a quarter of a billion push notifications every month.

That experience shaped how Marx thinks about infrastructure reliability. Elixir is built on top of Erlang, a language designed in the 1990s for fault-tolerant, highly distributed concurrent systems. One of Erlang's core tenets is something practitioners call "let it crash," and Marx explained what that actually means in practice:

"We don't want your system to crash, but actually sometimes you do because the best way to get back into a good state is to turn something off and turn it back on. The cliche of 'turn it off and turn it on again' is actually a really good way to build a reliable, scalable system."

Malbec Labs uses very little Elixir in its own stack, but Marx said the supervision patterns and fault-tolerance principles from that world carry directly into how DoubleZero is built.

Democratizing Private Networks

DoubleZero is a high-performance, decentralized network built around the premise that dedicated, private infrastructure should not be exclusive to large corporations. Marx pointed out that Google, Meta, Netflix, and high-frequency trading firms all operate their own private networks for a straightforward reason: the public internet prioritizes throughput over latency, and when trades are measured in nanoseconds, shared infrastructure introduces too much variability.

"DoubleZero is taking the same approach and open-sourcing it to the community," Marx said, "to say, 'Hey, what if we built this thing that can do the same thing as these high-frequency trading networks do, but we can bring it to Solana and basically any other use case that you can think of? If you can send a packet over the network, you can probably take advantage of DoubleZero.'"

DoubleZero Edge is the product built on top of that network specifically for traders. It delivers Solana shreds (the small data chunks assembled into blocks) as quickly as possible, using multicast as its underlying transport. Multicast is the same technology used by many high-frequency trading firms, a deliberate choice rather than an experiment.

Shapley Values and the Economics of Contribution

One area Marx spent time on is how DoubleZero compensates the network contributors who provide the physical links and devices. Malbec Labs owns none of the hardware. The 97 devices visible in the dashboard belong to independent operators, and the software Malbec Labs develops runs on top of their infrastructure.

Rewards are distributed using Shapley values, a concept from cooperative game theory. Marx, who holds a degree in economics, described the mechanism in plain terms: the system calculates how much worse the network would perform if a given link were absent, then distributes rewards proportionally to that marginal contribution. No single contributor captures all available rewards at the expense of others.

"The way that the rewards distribution is done is not a zero-sum game. It's not one person take all. We use something called Shapley values... the more you participate in the network or the more shreds that you publish, the more rewards you get. So it's a pretty easy concept to understand, although there's a lot of complicated math behind it."

When a link goes down or needs maintenance, operators drain it themselves and inform Malbec Labs. The protocol handles rerouting automatically, consistent with the fault-tolerance approach Marx described earlier.

Boring by Design

Marx returned more than once to a presentation called the "Boring Technology Club." The premise is that a startup has a limited number of innovation tokens, and spending those on unproven infrastructure is usually a mistake. For DoubleZero, the claimed innovation is decentralization and community ownership of hardware. The underlying technologies, including multicast and existing internet protocols that have been in use for two decades or more, are intentionally conventional.

"We've basically taken all of these tried-and-true internet technologies that have existed for 20 years or more and the same with the high-frequency trading and big tech company private networks. We've taken all of that because we know it works and we've put a novel approach on it by being decentralized, by us owning none of the hardware or the links. And that's also why we've been able to iterate so quickly and build it up."

Marx applied this logic to infrastructure reliability directly. If an infrastructure product behaves unpredictably, something has gone wrong. The network launched testnet in April of last year, encountered a minor issue in June or July, and has run without a major outage since. All network performance data is public and on-chain, including win rates by region and the head-to-head comparisons against the public internet that closed out the demo.

Developers who want to connect to DoubleZero Edge can sign up at doublezero.xyz or access documentation at docs.malbeclabs.com. More detail on the shred delivery product is at fastshreds.com. A geolocation verification feature, which Marx described as "pretty hot off the presses," was also released around the time of the episode.