Austin Federa, the strategic director of the Solana Foundation, has left the project and co-founded a new protocol and network aimed at managing high-performance, permissionless networks. Federa stated that his new project, DoubleZero, is not a Layer 1 or Layer 2 protocol, but rather something completely different - an N1, a new global base layer network optimized for blockchain, with the hope of increasing bandwidth and reducing latency.