Sei Network V2 Upgrade: What Will Happen And When Does It Launch?

Holders of the SEI Network token are ringing in the new year with a price rally that has seen SEI register a new all-time high (ATH) just two days into 2024.

The token, which launched in mid-August of last year, witnessed gains of more than 70% in the past week before reaching its latest $0.7947 ATH today, 2 January, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

What is Sei Network?

The Sei Network is a trading-focused open-source layer-1 blockchain backed by high-profile investors that aims for "unparalleled speeds" and low transaction fees. 

Since its launch in August 2023, the SEI token has managed to establish a market capitalization that exceeds $1.5billion, with 24-hour trading volumes also moving above $1bn. Appetite for SEI futures has also more than tripled from the start of December 2023 when open interest sat at around $69million, rising to roughly $240m today.

Hype around SEI has also been building since its developers announced the Sei V2 upgrade last November. 

Sei V2 upgrade 

In response to increased interest and developer requests for higher flexibility as well as Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) support, the Sei Network team has proposed the Sei V2 upgrade. As per the official blog post from 29 November 2023, Sei wants to become the first “fully parallelized EVM”.

If a network is EVM-compliant, then it can run Ethereum-based applications; parallelization refers to batching and settling multiple transactions at the same time. To put this into perspective, Sei consistently outperforms other chains in terms of daily transactions per second (TPS), consistently handling around 45tps since its inception, and finalizes blocks at 390ms, which it claims to make it the “fastest chain in existence”.

Regarding the performance of Sei V2, the team wrote: “Sei V2 will offer 28,300 batched transactions per second of throughput, while offering 390 ms block times and 390 ms finality. This allows Sei to support many more users and far more interactive experiences than existing blockchains, while offering far cheaper per-transaction costs.”

Developers will also benefit from the upgrade, with improved functionality across smart contracts, its storage layer, interoperability, and much more. 

The upgrade is almost complete, and is set to be released via a public testnet in Q1 2024 with a view to deploy on to the mainnet within the first half of the year after audits are finalized.

Optimized for trading, Sei claims that any kind of trading application such as those created for decentralized financed (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), can operate at higher speeds and scale further compared to other layer-1 offerings.

Layer-1s still lacking

Balancing the trade-offs between scalability, decentralization, and capital efficiency is what many refer to as 'The Exchange Trilemma', as all three are notoriously difficult to achieve and maintain at the same time.

Despite all the incredible innovations and upgrades we’ve relished in blockchain and crypto over the years, one of the most persistent problems to hinder progress has been scaling on layer-1 networks.

But with the introduction of Sei, and most notably its goal of being “the first” fully parallelized EVM, we may finally see the explosion in DeFi and digital asset trading that Web3 has been waiting for.