1. Introduction
2. Sei Network – Overview
3. Layer 1 scenario
4. Sei Comparision
5. Sei – Core Principles
6. Team and Investment
7. Our belief in Sei
8. Conclusion

Introduction

Blockchain technology is becoming a fundamental part of the global economy. The underlying decentralized network has to deal with the Blockchain Trilemma. This involves balancing three crucial aspects: decentralization, security, and scalability. Decentralization means spreading computing power and decision-making across a wide network, ensuring no single entity has control. Security involves protecting the network from attacks and malicious actions. Both of these are essential for a blockchain to function properly.

Another essential component of blockchain networks is scalability. It speaks to their capacity to manage a high volume of transactions and support expansion in the future. Blockchain networks cannot successfully compete with conventional centralized platforms that provide speedy transaction processing if they lack high scalability. For instance, Visa can process thousands of transactions per second (TPS), while Bitcoin can only handle 4–7 TPS. Blockchain technology needs to reach or even surpass this level of scalability to compete with such systems. As a result, a specialized segment of the blockchain market is concentrated on improving scalability.

Thankfully, a fresh wave of scaling solutions and blockchains is starting to surface, tailored to address the transaction-capacity problem. These developments are making a big difference and pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology’s scalability.

In this piece, we will discuss the fastest L1 blockchain network. Sei is now known as the fastest Layer 1 blockchain on the market. It boasts processing speeds of less than 400ms time to finality. Sei’s infrastructure is designed to be exceptionally fast and efficient, focusing on trading applications and exchanges. 

Sei Network – Overview

Sei is the first parallelized, high-performance EVM Layer 1 blockchain that brings extreme scalability to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and extends the Ethereum ecosystem by improving execution, consensus, and storage layers—all while maintaining decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionlessness. By optimizing every component of its technological stack, Sei provides the best infrastructure for a range of trading applications and several other use cases including DeFi, Gaming, NFTs, etc. Thanks to its creative consensus techniques and cutting-edge technological innovations, Sei bills itself as the fastest blockchain on the market.

With its network architecture, Sei has made several significant improvements. Most notable is the Twin Turbo Consensus mechanism, which delivers top-tier performance. This mechanism ensures a finality time as low as 380 milliseconds in Sei’s mainnet, making it ten times faster than Solana. Sei offers developers high-performance infrastructure to build decentralized exchanges and improve capital efficiency. 

Layer – 1 scenario

Layer 1 blockchains serve as the foundational frameworks of the cryptocurrency industry. They provide several key advantages that are essential to the operation and expansion of the digital economy. 

L1 blockchains provide key benefits such as decentralization, security, immutability, and transparency. This ensures that no single entity controls the network, transactions are permanent and accurate, and all activities are visible, fostering trust and accountability. These blockchains function independently, handling transactions and executing smart contracts without depending on external systems. They also use different consensus mechanisms, like Proof of Work or Proof of Stake, to validate transactions and maintain the integrity of the network.

Most Layer-1 blockchains support native tokens that are essential to the network’s economy. The network’s utility and value are increased by these tokens, which are used for transaction fees, staking, and governance. As the core layer in blockchain technology, L1 blockchains are widely accepted and integrated into various systems and services. They also provide a versatile foundation for developers to create a wide range of decentralized applications.

Popular Layer-1 blockchains gain significant advantages from strong network effects. They are typically more resistant to congestion than Layer-2 solutions because as more users join, the network’s value and utility increase. Although they can ease some of the congestion on Layer-1, Layer-2 solutions still depend on Layer-1 for foundational security and final transaction settlement.

Sei Comparision

Sei is a specialized Layer 1 blockchain that brings extreme scalability to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and extends the Ethereum ecosystem. It provides a fast and efficient platform for trading and financial transactions. Its standout features include optimized order book functionality and a built-in matching engine, which sets it apart by greatly reducing latency and enhancing the efficiency of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other financial protocols. The SEI token is integral to the ecosystem and is used for transaction fees, network governance, and potentially staking. It plays a crucial role in the network’s maintenance and operation.

Although Sei bills itself as “the fastest blockchain,” the industry has no universally accepted measure of speed. Sei’s claim is based on the mechanisms used to finalize a transaction after it’s submitted to the chain, making it immutable. This measure is known as “time to finality” or TTF. Sei’s time to finality is less than 400 milliseconds. In contrast, Bitcoin’s TTF is about an hour, Ethereum’s is around two minutes and newer blockchains designed for dApp development often achieve TTFs of just a few seconds.

Another common measure of speed and overall performance is transactions per second (TPS), which indicates the number of on-chain transactions the blockchain can process each second. According to data from Chainspect, Solana and Hedera had the highest actual TPS over the previous 30 days, while Sei came in sixth. Nonetheless, Sei has the fastest TTF (at 0.38 seconds) out of the top ten chains by TPS, with the next fastest chain having a TTF of 6 seconds.

The type of transaction determines TTF’s significance. Users of a DeFi app built on Sei should theoretically experience fewer delays due to a faster TTF. For instance, it would enable users to observe the prompt appearance of tokens in their account following a trade on a DEX.

To compete with traditional payment processing systems, blockchain networks need to be highly scalable, and capable of handling a rapidly increasing number of users, transactions, and data. Blockchain networks can only outperform these legacy systems by skillfully integrating scalability. While Layer-2 solutions are third-party protocols that interface with a Layer-1 blockchain to increase transaction throughput, Layer-1 solutions improve the performance of the native blockchain.

Sei has achieved technological success with chain-level optimizations that boost the performance and scalability of decentralized exchanges and trading apps, making it an attractive option for developers. Furthermore, the Sei Ecosystem Fund supports early-stage founders and teams, encouraging innovation and growth within its ecosystem.

With chain-level optimizations that improve the scalability and performance of all apps (from DEXes, and lending protocol, to on-chain games, NFTs, etc), Sei has achieved technological success and is now a desirable choice for developers. In addition, the Sei Ecosystem Fund fosters innovation and expansion within its ecosystem by providing support to teams and founders in their early stages.

Sei – Core Principles

Relentless Innovation

The team at Sei is relentlessly innovating to bring extreme scalability and extend the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). By parallelizing transaction execution and optimizing all layers, they aim to drastically reduce gas fees and significantly increase throughput.

Community-first, Open Source, and Open Standards

Open-source code encourages transparency, community contributions, and inspection, increasing security, and trust. Sei openly shares its research and innovations with the community to promote collaboration and speed up innovation. SEI adheres to and builds upon open standards to provide full EVM compatibility.

Decentralization

Decentralization is essential to prevent reverting to centralized systems and to resist coordinated attacks, including those from nation-states. SEI aims to be sufficiently decentralized to withstand censorship resistance. It’s designed to run on consumer-grade computers.

Censorship Resistance and Credible Neutrality

SEI strives to be a platform that cannot be halted or tampered with. Transactions are processed without bias, ensuring fairness and openness.

Permissionlessness

SEI encourages open participation. Anyone can use, contribute, and build on SEI without needing permission.

Trust Minimization

The protocol is designed so that no single entity can control or shut it down. SEI distributes control to enhance security and trust.

Team and Investment

Through strategic developments, the Sei network made significant progress in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry in 2023. With the help of a $50 million investment from Foresight Ventures, the Sei Ecosystem Fund was able to grow to $120 million and support Web3 applications in domains such as NFTs, gaming, and DeFi. This followed a prior $30 million that was raised from different investors including Mapleblock Capital. Sei’s growth strategy targeted the Asian market, leveraging the region’s technological expertise and high crypto adoption, and included partnerships such as Graviton in India.

Sei Labs was founded by Jeff Feng and Jayendra Jog in August 2022. It had raised $5 million at the time from Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, and Coinbase Ventures. Jayendra Jog is a former software engineer at Robinhood and had previously interned at Facebook (Meta). Before joining Jayendra at Sei Labs, Jeff worked at a technology-focused investment management firm and was also a part of the investment banking team at Goldman Sachs. Together they make the perfect team with the right amount of experience as an investor and a developer. They felt the need to have a blockchain specifically for trading and worked diligently to scale in that direction.

Our Belief in Sei

Since its mainnet beta launch in August 2023, Sei has pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with a globally distributed node network. The blockchain consistently finalizes blocks in just 390 milliseconds, making it the fastest available chain. Sei also maintains over 45 (TPS), which places it second among active blockchains in terms of successful TPS. The idea that an integrated blockchain offers significantly better performance than a modular one is supported by the impressive fact that all of this has been accomplished without any outages or unexpected downtime.

Seiv2 is currently live. It is parallelized and EVM-compatible. Through the creation of a highly optimized execution layer that makes use of the EVM’s resources and community, this update seeks to combine the advantages of Solana and Ethereum. 

However handling more transactions results in more states in the blockchain, so managing state must be taken into consideration in addition to just parallelizing execution. SeiDB reinvents the management of state access, commitment, and storage, which is a fundamental component of Sei v2. SeiDB is designed to handle state input/output with parallel execution in mind, while also addressing issues like state bloat and sync times, all without increasing the hardware requirements for nodes.

Sei V2 further offers optimistic parallelization which allows the chain to support parallelization without requiring the developers to define any dependencies. Sei also has seamless composability as Interoperability with the existing chain which ensures smooth integration between EVM and other execution environments on Sei. The upgrade also maintains backward compatibility for EVM smart contracts which enables developers to deploy audited contracts from EVM-compatible blockchains without any code modifications. Additionally, it allows for the reuse of familiar applications and tools, such as MetaMask.

Sei is an impressive blockchain with a remarkable ecosystem and significant achievements. Its advanced technology stack, extensive ecosystem, experienced team, and backing from prominent investors all highlight its potential. Sei is a general-purpose, parallelized EVM-compatible L1 blockchain with Soverign consensus.

Conclusion

In recent years, trading digital assets have become more popular, with decentralized exchanges (DEXs) playing a crucial role. Unlike centralized exchanges, DEXs enable users to trade cryptocurrencies directly with each other, eliminating the need for intermediaries. This approach offers greater security, transparency, and control for users. However, most DEXs struggle with scalability on Layer 1 blockchains due to the Exchange Trilemma, which involves balancing decentralization, scalability, and capital efficiency—a challenging feat to achieve simultaneously.

Sei is a new Layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for trading, offering fast transaction speeds, low fees, and high throughput. By addressing the scalability challenges of the Exchange Trilemma, Sei provides a promising platform for various trading applications, including DeFi DEXs, NFT marketplaces, and gaming DEXs, all of which can benefit from its infrastructure.

It’s important to note that Sei and similar projects are still in the early stages of development and may undergo significant changes. Users should exercise caution and use risk management strategies when engaging with the network. This information is intended for educational purposes and is not financial advice.