Gaming-focused chain Sei surges 85% on the week — why?

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Sei is a L1 blockchain launched in August 2023.

A confluence of positive tailwinds have given its native SEI token a monster pump of 85% over the past week.

Earlier this week, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission announced the selection of Sei (and Aptos) as the final two candidates for its WYST stablecoin pilot, the first initiative of its kind by a US state.

Two other factors are possibly contributing to SEI’s price action. 

First, momentum around Circle’s recent IPO, which based on its S-1 filing, holds 6,250,000 SEI ($1.9 million today). Second is a pending SEI ETF filed by Canary Capital back in May.

Source: Circle S-1.

How does Sei’s onchain economy look beyond buzzy news headlines?

TVL is on the up. It’s at about $564 million today, of which $418 million sits on Yei Finance money market. In the last seven days, Sei is the fourth-largest chain by net inflows, at $4.9 million.

Source: Dune.

Most of Sei’s usage is driven by gaming. Based on DappRadar, Sei has about 34% (7.38 million) of the Web3 gaming market share by unique active wallets in the last 30 days.

(For context, Ronin has about 718k active wallets in the same time period.)

Source: DappRadar.

Granted, active wallets are a notoriously gamifiable metric, but it does point to the considerably strong niche that Sei has carved out for itself in Web3 gaming.

Dominant games include the World of Dypians MMORPG on Epic Games, as well as mobile games like Archer Hunter and Hot Spring — both on the App Store and Google Play. All three games rank in the top 10 most active games on Sei in the last 30 days.

Finally, the tech.

Sei is already a pretty fast chain today, processing roughly 100 Mgas per second (12.5k TPS) with a time-to-finality of 500ms.

Its upcoming “Giga” upgrade is set to ramp this even higher, to a target of 5 Ggas per second, targeting 200k TPS and a sub-400 ms finality. 

These gains come from a radical architectural overhaul:

• Autobahn is a multi-proposer consensus protocol that replaces the current single-proposer Tendermint model.
• Decoupling consensus and execution will allow transactions to be ordered independently of execution, unlocking asynchronous execution.
• Parallel execution — using Block-STM-style techniques familiar from Move-based chains — accelerates transaction processing across multiple cores.

Blockworks Research.

Blockworks Research’s Loso told me: “Wyoming’s consideration of Sei as one of the top options for its stablecoin initiative shows a strong vote of confidence in [Sei’s] technical capabilities.” 

For a comprehensive explainer on Sei’s upcoming Giga upgrade and how it compares to other chains, see Blockworks Advisory’s report on Sei.

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