What Is The Sei Network? The Complete Guide

By Lipsa Das

A core challenge in the blockchain industry is the trade-off between performance and compatibility. Ethereum’s sequential processing model, while foundational for smart contracts, struggles with the high transaction throughput required for mainstream applications. 

While Layer 2 solutions and alternative Layer 1 blockchains have emerged to address this, they often introduce new compromises, such as persistent bottlenecks or sacrificing compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This forces a difficult choice on developers: build for performance or for access to Ethereum’s mature ecosystem. 

The Sei Network is designed to address this challenge directly, with an architecture optimized to provide high throughput while maintaining full EVM compatibility.

In this article, Ledger Academy breaks down everything you need to know about the Sei network, from its core technology to its growing ecosystem.

What Is The Sei Network?

Sei is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain combining parallel execution, advanced consensus mechanisms, and optimized storage to achieve web2-level throughput without sacrificing decentralization.

According to Sei, the network currently supports up to 12,500 transactions per second (TPS) through parallel execution and achieves finality in under 400 milliseconds. The platform maintains full EVM compatibility and, as of the latest data, holds over $600 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) with more than 800,000 daily active addresses. 

Looking ahead, the “Sei Giga” upgrade is designed to significantly increase these metrics, targeting a throughput of 5 gigagas per second—a projected 50x improvement over current EVM chains—and over 200,000 TPS via the new Autobahn consensus protocol. This future update also introduces a multi-proposer architecture to reduce bottlenecks and asynchronous execution to decouple consensus from state computation.

Who Is Behind Sei Network?

Jeffrey Feng and Jayendra Jog co-founded Sei Labs in 2021, bringing complementary expertise from traditional finance and technology. Feng’s background at Goldman Sachs and Coatue Management provided an understanding of trading systems and market infrastructure. At the same time, Jog’s engineering experience at Robinhood brought expertise in building high-performance consumer applications.

The team secured over $30 million in funding from leading crypto investors, including Multicoin Capital, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and Delphi Digital.

What Is Sei For?

Sei’s high-performance EVM is designed to support application categories that require high throughput, such as real-time gaming or social platforms, while maintaining full compatibility with existing Ethereum tooling and infrastructure.

Consumer Applications

While traditional blockchains that process 10-100 transactions per second make it difficult to build responsive consumer applications, Sei’s reported performance of over 12,500 TPS with sub-400ms finality is designed to enable more demanding use cases. 

This includes applications such as real-time gaming with instant state updates, social platforms capable of supporting thousands of concurrent users, interactive entertainment with complex user interactions, and high-frequency DeFi protocols that require rapid execution.

Developer Experience

Sei is designed to provide the performance of a custom blockchain while maintaining full compatibility with Ethereum’s established developer ecosystem. This allows developers to deploy existing smart contracts written in Solidity or Vyper without requiring any changes. The platform supports familiar development tools, including MetaMask, Remix, and Hardhat, ensuring a seamless transition for those already building on Ethereum. 

Furthermore, its architecture is optimized for parallel execution, where transactions run concurrently when possible and sequentially when necessary, ensuring that existing decentralized applications are backward compatible and can function on the network without modification.

Institutional Infrastructure

Furthermore, Sei’s architecture is designed to address enterprise requirements by providing deterministic performance through its optimized consensus and execution layers. It aims to offer censorship resistance via multi-proposer block production and supports large, professional node operators through scalable validator economics. The platform also includes regulatory compliance tools accessible via its governance and auditability features. 

Reflecting this enterprise focus, the network has attracted over 150 projects since its mainnet beta launch, spanning DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, gaming platforms, and various infrastructure providers.

What Is SEI Token?

As the native token of the Sei network, SEI serves several critical functions, including the payment of transaction fees, securing the network through validator staking (which requires a 21-day unbonding period), participating in governance proposals, and acting as native collateral within DeFi applications.

The network’s economic model is designed to promote decentralization by distributing block rewards equally among all active validators and their delegators. Of the total 10 billion SEI supply:

• 48% is allocated to the Ecosystem Reserve
• 20% to the team
• 20% to private sale investors
• 9% to the Foundation
• 3% to community programs 

To ensure broad distribution, the project has conducted multiple community airdrops for active users and ecosystem participants, specifically structured to exclude large holders.

How Does Sei Network Work?

Sei’s performance is derived from foundational architectural changes across its consensus, execution, and storage layers. Each component is specifically optimized to maximize throughput while maintaining security and decentralization.

Parallel Execution Engine

The core of its performance is a parallel execution engine that employs optimistic parallelization. Unlike traditional blockchains that process transactions one by one, Sei runs multiple transactions simultaneously. By default, the system assumes transactions will not conflict and processes them in parallel. 

If a conflict is detected, only the specific conflicting transactions are re-executed sequentially, which maintains state consistency without halting the entire process. To optimize this system, the network uses advanced bytecode analysis to predict transaction dependencies and minimize conflicts. 

According to Sei’s documentation, this approach is projected to deliver up to 40x higher throughput than purely sequential processing.

Asynchronous Execution

Sei further enhances throughput with asynchronous execution, which decouples consensus from state computation. Once the transaction order is agreed upon, the execution results are mathematically determined, allowing consensus to focus only on ordering. While new blocks are being proposed and finalized, previous blocks are executed in parallel background processes. This pipelined approach, where parsing, signature verification, and address recovery happen simultaneously, allows the network to maintain high block production rates even during periods of complex transaction processing.

Storage Architecture

Finally, Sei replaces traditional Merkle tree storage with a cryptographic accumulator system optimized for high throughput. It uses a flat key-value store to eliminate the overhead of tree-based structures, enabling more efficient operations. State root generation happens asynchronously in the background, removing storage from the critical path of consensus.

This is complemented by a tiered storage model, which keeps recent data on high-performance SSDs while migrating historical data to more cost-effective solutions, optimizing both performance and economics.

Autobahn Consensus (Sei Giga)

For its upcoming Sei Giga upgrade, the network will introduce Autobahn, a consensus protocol designed to reduce traditional blockchain bottlenecks. Instead of relying on single block producers, its multi-proposer architecture allows every validator to continuously propose transactions in parallel “lanes.” 

Validators then vote on data availability using compact cryptographic proofs rather than downloading full blocks, separating consensus from data dissemination. The protocol also periodically commits a snapshot aggregating the latest proposals from all lanes, allowing multiple blocks to be finalized in a single consensus round and reducing communication overhead.

The Sei Ecosystem

Since its mainnet beta launch in July 2024, the network’s ecosystem has grown to include applications and infrastructure across several key categories. 

In DeFi, this includes native DEXs designed for high-frequency trading, lending and borrowing protocols that utilize SEI as collateral, liquid staking solutions, and cross-chain bridges to major blockchain networks. The ecosystem also supports a range of consumer applications, from NFT marketplaces with instant transaction finality to gaming and social platforms built for real-time interaction. 

For developers, the network provides familiar tooling such as Etherscan integration, compatibility with wallets like MetaMask, oracle services, and security audit providers. To accelerate this growth, the Sei Foundation has also launched a $50 million Japan Ecosystem Fund, targeting sectors like gaming and entertainment where the foundation believes the network’s performance advantages can be most beneficial.

The Future of Sei Network

Sei Network’s roadmap is focused on achieving Web2-level performance while maintaining core blockchain principles like decentralization and security. Key technical goals include the “Sei Giga” deployment, targeting over 200,000 transactions per second, and a multi-proposer consensus mechanism to enhance stability by removing single points of failure. The plan also features advanced parallelization and significant storage optimizations to support large-scale data growth.

In parallel, the strategy emphasizes ecosystem development through builder programs, research partnerships, and enterprise adoption initiatives. This positions Sei to serve applications that require both high throughput and the inherent security of a blockchain, aiming to provide a foundational layer for mainstream adoption.