Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Yesterday, Layer1 public chain Sei Network announced that after completing a round of financing of $30 million with a valuation of $800 million, its ecological fund has completed a new round of financing of $50 million. In addition to the $20 million special fund contributed by the cryptocurrency exchange MEXC to the Sei ecosystem in January this year, Sei Network has become the Layer1 public chain with the largest financing scale so far this year.
As a rising star public chain of the same period as Aptos and Sui, Sei Network, although not as successful as the former in terms of “peaking at debut”, has made rapid progress in its testnet and ecological development since the release of its white paper at the end of October last year.
Sei Network has been very active recently. With the mainnet and airdrop release imminent, this article summarizes the latest progress and ecological landscape of Sei Network.
What are the characteristics of Sei Network?
Sei Network was founded by Jay Jog and Jeff Feng in 2022. According to official introduction, there are three main types of Sei team members: senior engineers from traditional Internet companies such as Robinhood and Airbnb, crypto OGs in the Cosmos ecosystem, and traders from Goldman Sachs, investment institutions and with rich experience in traditional technology.
With a background in the Internet, encryption, and traditional financial technology, what differentiation is the Sei team committed to making in the fierce competition among public chains?
From the Sei Network blog post, we can learn that, first of all, in terms of positioning, Layer1 public chains can be roughly divided into two categories, one is general chains such as Ethereum and Solana, and the other is application-specific chains such as dYdX and Osmosis. Sei finds a middle ground between the two, which is neither a general chain nor an application-specific chain, but a DeFi-specific Layer1.
Sei Network is built on the Cosmos ecosystem and aims to become a high-speed chain dedicated to transactions, helping decentralized exchanges to operate better, thereby making the emergence of new financial products (complex futures and options, live sports betting) possible.
In addition to clear positioning differentiation, Sei has also optimized and innovated in terms of performance, efficiency, security and composability.
In terms of performance and efficiency, Sei upgraded Cosmos' ABCI to make each step of the consensus programmable, thereby achieving improvements in three key areas: optimized block production, smart block broadcasting, and parallel execution of orders.
In terms of optimizing block production, a standard Cosmos chain has a block confirmation time of about 6 seconds. Sei shortened it to 500 milliseconds by optimizing consensus. Sei said this is the fastest final block confirmation time in Web3. In addition to optimizing block production, Sei also improved smart block broadcasting, allowing proposers to only send the hash value of each transaction in the block instead of all transaction data, and validators can quickly rebuild blocks by using their own local mempool, improving block broadcast efficiency. For the optimization of block production and block broadcasting (these two optimizations are called Twin Turbo consensus by Sei), Sei increased throughput by more than 80%.
In addition, Sei also allows transactions that originally need to be executed sequentially to be processed in parallel, that is, independent markets that do not overlap can be processed simultaneously. Through parallel execution, the block time can be reduced by 75-90% compared to sequential processing, with a parallel delay of 40-120ms and a sequential delay of 200-1370ms.
In terms of security, Sei maintains a centralized validator set, so that protocols built on Sei will be able to utilize Sei's validators without assembling their own validator set, thereby reducing one of the biggest obstacles for protocols to migrate to Cosmos. In addition, Sei uses frequent batch auctions to resist MEV, so that the ordering of transactions within the batch will not affect the price.
In terms of composability, Sei, as a Cosmos chain that supports IBC, is inherently asynchronously composable. At the same time, Sei has also created a composable architecture for the on-chain order book, allowing synchronous composability between CosmWasm applications on Sei and sharing liquidity through the native order matching engine.
Sei Network’s Latest Developments
When Sei Network released its white paper at the end of October last year, it had already made its airdrop public, saying that 1% of the total supply of SEI would be used to reward testnet participants. In February of this year, when Sei was seeking Series A funding, it said that it would launch the mainnet and release airdrops in a few months.
In March and April, Sei Network was active. First, it announced the latest progress of the test network. On March 14, Sei Network announced the launch of Atlantic-2, the final test network version before the main network was launched. Atlantic-2 uses Sei's Twin Turbo consensus, DeliverTx and Enblock parallelization, and permissionless deployment. Twin Turbo consensus enables Sei to broadcast and process blocks faster; in terms of parallelization, Sei uses two different types of parallelization to further improve network throughput and latency, where DeliverTx parallelization allows parallelization of all types of transactions, while Endblock parallelization only applies to order transactions.
Sei Network also released some data about the final testnet version Atlantic-2. A week after the Atlantic-2 testnet was launched, it had more than 500,000 independent users. Within a month, it attracted more than 3.6 million independent users and processed more than 35 million transactions.
The second is the establishment of the Sei Foundation. On March 29, Sei Network officially announced the news on Twitter, stating that the Sei Foundation is a non-profit organization to support the Sei ecosystem to fund protocol development and grow the ecosystem. The Sei Foundation will handle token grants, airdrops, product requests, initiatives, and delegation programs. In addition, the Sei Labs team remains committed to developing open source software.
The third is to explore NFT. On April 4, Sei Network tweeted that the Sei Sunken Treasure event is Sei’s largest NFT series, with more than 600,000 NFTs minted since March 15, and launched the second phase of the Sei Sunken Treasure NFT event.
Recently, Sei Network and Sei Labs Ecosystem Fund announced two large financing rounds within two days, which can also accelerate the development of its ecosystem to a certain extent.
Sei Network's Ecosystem
In addition to the $50 million new round of financing recently announced by the Sei Ecosystem Fund, in January this year, the cryptocurrency exchange MEXC also contributed a $20 million special fund to the Sei ecosystem. Together with the $50 million ecological fund launched by Sei Network in September 2022, the scale of its ecological funds exceeds $120 million.
In terms of ecological projects, according to the latest financing press release, there are already 120 cooperative projects in the Sei Network ecosystem. There are currently about 70 cooperative projects disclosed on the official website, with the key areas covered being decentralized exchanges, infrastructure, wallets, and cross-chain bridges.
Source: Encrypted data platform RootData
Decentralized Exchanges
Sushiswap: Sushiswap is a DEX based on automatic market making. In January this year, Sushiswap announced the launch of a decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Sei Network.
Satori: Satori is an on-chain derivatives protocol built on Polkadot that allows users to increase their income by executing complex trades involving leverage, while having the flexibility to tailor the return and risk profile to suit their needs.
Vortex Protocol: Vortex is a decentralized derivatives exchange for IBC chains. As a permissionless and decentralized protocol, Vortex provides many of the same features as centralized exchanges (lending, cross-collateralization, and cross-margining).
Cypher Protocol: Cypher is a decentralized futures infrastructure standard built on the Solana blockchain. The protocol will allow derivatives to be created and traded through Serum’s DEX.
Pharaon: The Pharaoh Protocol is an extended synthetic protocol for Cosmos that allows price exposure to commodities, forex, and any crypto token with a price oracle feed.
Synthr: Synthr is a synthetic asset protocol that enables users to create and trade on-chain derivatives of various financial assets using trustless financial contracts.
Kryptonite: Kryptonite is a decentralized AMM and staking protocol that works with any bAssets on the Cosmos blockchain and other blockchains.
infrastructure
Agoric: Agoric is a layer1 PoS public blockchain designed to enable developers to quickly build secure smart contracts using JavaScript, the most popular programming language on the planet.
White Whale: White Whale is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that provides tools for efficient markets through arbitrage, flash loans, and cross-chain liquidity pools.
Kado: Kado is a payments infrastructure built for Web3. The company’s on-ramp/off-ramp service integrates with U.S. Automated Clearing House (ACH), wire transfers, Visa, and Mastercard in over 150 countries, allowing users to convert fiat and digital assets using their non-custodial wallets.
Andromeda: Andromeda is an application platform layer that uses IBC to connect all public blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Convergence: Convergence is a decentralized interchangeable asset protocol that makes privacy tokens interchangeable in the DeFi space by segmenting privacy tokens and combining them with other DeFi protocols using a single easy-to-use interface.
KYVE Network: KYVE is a Web3 data verification solution that provides fast and easy tools for decentralized data verification, immutability, and retrieval, revolutionizing customized and secure access to on-chain and off-chain data.
Noox: Noox is a Web3 reputation platform for Web3 users to mint badges based on on-chain activity.
Paddle: Paddle is a Cosmos-based Move Virtual Machine (MVM) Rollup that provides a sandbox environment for deploying smart contracts written in Move.
wallet
Keplr: Keplr is a wallet for the cross-blockchain ecosystem. The wallet is designed to be compatible with Cosmos' IBC. It allows users to move digital assets back and forth between numerous chains.
Coin98: Coin98 is a multi-chain crypto wallet and DeFi gateway that allows TraFi users to access any DeFi service on multiple blockchains.
Cosmostation: Cosmostation is a validator node operator and wallet provider, Cosmostation is trusted by 35+ networks. It also contributes to the network by providing end-user applications such as Mintscan and wallet applications to the community.
Leap Wallet: Leap Wallet is a non-custodial wallet based on Cosmos that supports users to connect Ledger with Leap Wallet to improve its security.
Cross-chain bridge
Axelar Network: Axelar is a decentralized cross-chain communication network that connects heterogeneous blockchains and enables asset mobility and program composability in an optimized manner for builders and end users.
Celer Network: Celer is a blockchain interoperability protocol that provides a one-click user experience for cross-chain access to tokens, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, governance, and more.
Multichain: Multichain is a cross-chain router protocol that meets the explicit need for different blockchains to communicate with each other. Multichain aims to be the ultimate router for web3.
