Sei sei

Sei is a delegated-proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain built for high-performance applications, with a current focus on trading, payments, decentralized finance, tokenized assets, and other financial-market workloads. The project describes itself as a parallelized EVM chain: it supports standard Ethereum smart contracts and tooling while optimizing execution, consensus, and storage for low latency. Its native asset is SEI, used for gas, staking, and governance.

Sei operates the Pacific-1 mainnet and Atlantic-2 testnet. The current EVM mainnet chain ID is 1329 and its public RPC endpoint is https://evm-rpc.sei-apis.com. The official documentation describes approximately 400 ms finality, about 100 MGas/s throughput today, and full compatibility with common Solidity, Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js, viem, and wagmi workflows.

The chain combines EVM execution with Cosmos-derived functionality. Its codebase documents interoperability between EVM and CosmWasm, while official documentation describes a unified account model with both 0x and sei1 representations and native precompiles for functions such as staking, governance, oracle access, distribution, banking, and CosmWasm calls. Developers can therefore deploy familiar EVM contracts while accessing Sei-native capabilities.

Sei's longer-term roadmap includes Sei Giga, a planned architecture targeting 200,000 transactions per second and 5 gigagas/s through Autobahn multi-proposer BFT consensus, a custom EVM execution engine, and a redesigned storage layer. These are roadmap targets rather than claims about the currently deployed mainnet, so they should be distinguished from the current network's documented performance.

General-purpose blockchains commonly execute transactions sequentially, making throughput sensitive to the slowest transaction and limiting the usefulness of modern multi-core hardware. Financial applications add demanding requirements: fast settlement, frequent updates, predictable execution, deep liquidity interactions, and the ability to process many independent trades or transfers without long confirmation delays. Sei positions its execution and storage design as an answer to those constraints.

Ethereum compatibility can also create a trade-off: applications want existing Solidity contracts and tooling, but high-throughput chains often require a new programming model or specialized infrastructure. Sei addresses this by preserving standard EVM deployment paths while automatically parallelizing transactions that touch independent state. Applications with heavily shared state can still experience contention; the official developer guidance recommends user-scoped state patterns to obtain more parallelism.

The design does not remove ordinary blockchain risks. Validators, staking, smart-contract bugs, bridge or external-protocol risks, congestion, and changes to protocol features remain relevant. In particular, current Sei documentation states that IBC has been disabled in both directions under SIP-03, so users should not assume that historical Cosmos/IBC transfer paths remain available.

Sei's parallelization engine uses optimistic concurrency control. It estimates the state keys a transaction may read or write, executes transactions with non-conflicting estimated access in parallel across worker pools, tracks actual reads and writes, and detects conflicts. Conflicting transactions are re-executed deterministically; if a batch cannot be safely parallelized, the system can fall back to sequential processing. This preserves a final state equivalent to sequential execution while benefiting from concurrent work when transactions are independent.

Twin Turbo Consensus is a set of optimizations around Tendermint-style Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus rather than an entirely separate consensus family. The official docs describe pipelined block preparation, aggressive configuration tuning, concurrent transaction decoding and dependency analysis, and overlap between transaction execution and prevote/precommit rounds. Once the validator set reaches the required voting threshold, buffered state changes can be committed rapidly, producing the documented sub-second finality target.

SeiDB is the chain's performance-oriented storage layer. It is integrated with execution so state reads, writes, caching, versioning, and commit work can support high transaction volume. The official architecture documentation describes snapshot/MVCC-style isolation, buffered speculative writes, conflict-aware commits, and asynchronous persistence as mechanisms that reduce storage bottlenecks.

At the application layer, Sei exposes an EVM JSON-RPC interface and supports standard Ethereum development tools. Gas is paid in SEI, while precompiles expose native chain functions to EVM contracts. Mainnet users can inspect transactions and addresses with Seiscan (seiscan.io), and developers can use the documented RPC and testnet faucet to deploy and test contracts.