Sei (SEI)

History, technology and key data — no opinions, no advice

Historical price evolution of Sei

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Sei was born in 2021 from the direct experience of its co-founders with the limitations of centralised financial infrastructure. Jayendra Jog, former Robinhood engineer who experienced first-hand the platform's collapse during the GameStop case in January 2021 due to its dependence on centralised intermediaries, partners with Jeffrey Feng, former investor at Coatue Management with previous experience at Citadel Securities and Goldman Sachs, to found Sei Labs. Their foundational thesis was clear: no existing blockchain could support the speed and reliability that a digital asset exchange needed.

During 2022, development of Sei begins as a Layer 1 blockchain specialised in trading, built on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Core. The project experiences significant growth in terms of funding during 2023: in April it raises $30 million in a round led by Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto, reaching a valuation of $800 million. Months later it closes an additional $50 million round led by Bitget and Foresight Ventures, with participation from investors such as Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Digital and Circle Ventures.

16th August 2023 marks a fundamental milestone with the launch of Sei's public mainnet (Sei V1). The SEI token is distributed via airdrop to early adopter users, with a total supply of 10,000 million tokens. The distribution includes 48% for the community, 20% for investors, 20% for the team, 9% for the foundation and 3% for Binance Launchpool, with 18% of the total supply being unlocked at TGE. In November 2023, Circle deploys USDC natively on Sei and makes a strategic investment in the network.

The SEI token reaches its all-time high of approximately $1.14 on 16th March 2024. In May 2024, Sei V2 launches, considered the protocol's most important update, which introduces full EVM compatibility allowing Solidity contracts to be executed without modifications, optimistic parallelisation of transactions and SeiDB, a new storage architecture. With this update, Sei becomes the first parallelised EVM blockchain.

During 2025, the ecosystem experiences significant developments. In January, the Sei Foundation launches Sapien Capital, a $65 million venture capital fund aimed at decentralised science (DeSci) startups on Sei. In May, both Canary Capital and 21Shares (the latter in August) submit applications to the SEC to register SEI-based ETFs with staking rewards. That same month Sei Giga launches, an improvement that increases throughput by 50 times, block production by 70 times and execution efficiency by 40 times, whilst maintaining EVM compatibility and the PoS consensus mechanism. In 2026, Sei begins the transition towards an exclusively EVM architecture, eliminating the Cosmos stack through the approval of SIP-3 by community governance.

Sei operates as a Layer 1 blockchain that combines Cosmos SDK architecture with a transition towards full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Its distinctive technical characteristic lies in parallel transaction execution: whilst traditional blockchains such as Ethereum process operations sequentially, Sei executes simultaneously those transactions that do not depend on one another. This approach enables speeds exceeding 12,500 transactions per second on its mainnet, with finalisation times under 400 milliseconds, establishing 200,000 TPS as a technical target with the implementation of Sei Giga.

The platform natively integrates an order matching engine known as Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) at protocol level, which enables decentralised exchanges built on Sei to offer order books directly on-chain without resorting to external oracles to determine prices. The SEI token performs three fundamental functions in the ecosystem: it acts as a payment medium for network gas fees, serves as a staking asset to secure the network through a Proof-of-Stake consensus system where validators can be penalised for inappropriate behaviour, and grants governance rights over the protocol.

Sei's architecture maintains complete compatibility with the Ethereum tooling ecosystem, including MetaMask, Remix, Hardhat and the Solidity programming language, whilst preserving interoperability with Cosmos infrastructure through the IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol, allowing communication between different blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.