Sei Labs takes $30 million to develop high-speed blockchain for commerce
Sei Labs, a contributor to the Sei blockchain focused on commerce, said today that it has raised $30 million over two strategic funding rounds, according to a press release.
Sei is a top-level, or Layer 1, blockchain designed to facilitate large-scale trading of digital assets. It claims to be the fastest blockchain in the industry, competing with the largest blockchains on the market. It is designed to support decentralized exchanges, markets and financial applications by providing high-speed transactions, high security and easy interoperability.
Investors in the rounds included Jump, Distributed Global, Multicoin, Asymmetric, Flow Traders, Hypersphere and Bixin Ventures. The funding brought the company’s valuation to $800 million, the company told TechCrunch.
The Sei blockchain is currently in a testnet phase, similar to being in beta, allowing developers to build applications before it launches on a mainnet. Sei can support up to 20,000 orders per second, with 500 milliseconds per transaction. Since the launch of the public testnet on March 13, the company said it has already processed over 35 million transactions and supports over 3.6 million testnet users.
In comparison, Ethereum, the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and the ecosystem of choice for developers to build decentralized finance apps for, can only process 20 transactions per second and complete most transactions in 2.5 seconds. A much faster blockchain designed to process non-fungible tokens, Solana supports 10,000 transactions per second with an equivalent 2.5 second transaction time.
“Infrastructure and applications historically come in cycles – Ethereum and the latest generation of public blockchains led to a Cambrian explosion of new decentralized apps over the past two years,” said Sei Labs co-founder Jayendra Jog. “Among these apps, exchanges and trading have achieved the clearest fit with the product market, but are held back by outdated Layer 1 blockchains. Our mission at Sei is to build the best infrastructure for trading.”
Blockchains like Ethereum, even though they go through upgrades like the merge to reduce energy use, suffer from bottlenecks that slow down throughput and generate huge fees for trading on the network. A second layer of blockchains is used to scale up Ethereum, increasing speeds and reducing fees. Sei’s vision is to develop its own top-level blockchain that can provide high-speed trading with scaling, but without the bottlenecks.
Already over 120 developer teams are deploying projects on Sei ahead of the mainnet launch. These include decentralized apps for community management, non-functional tokens, asset management, decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, games and wallets.
“This funding will accelerate our efforts to unlock the next cycle of new applications in Web3, allowing developers to build apps that are orders of magnitude more powerful than before,” Jog said.
