In this episode, host Cryptocito is joined by Jay, Co-Founder of Sei Network, to discuss what Sei is, how fast it is and more.
Read our notes below to learn more.
About Jay
One of the co-founders of Sei Labs and leads engineering.
Got into crypto in 2017.
Spent 4 years working at Robinhood.
Last year, Jay and his co-founder started building a decentralized Robinhood.
Started looking at the exchange trilemma which is decentralization, scalability and capital efficiency.
Their mission is to build the best infrastructure for exchanges.
About Sei Network
Building a L1 blockchain that is completely sovereign.
Started building with the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Core.
Added Twin Turbo Consensus.
They changed the way block propagation works, the way block processing works and this helped them get down to 300 millisecond time to finality in their internal tesnet and 600 millisecond time to finality in their devnet.
The only Cosmos chain that uses parallelization of any kind that helped them improve the amount of throughput that they’re able to process to 22,000 orders per second right now.
They added a native order matching engine that is primitive and built into the chain itself that exchanges can use to help create new markets.
They have 21 people in their team.
Post-FTX collapse
It highlighted how their original thesis was correct.
As a L1 chain, one of the things they’re focusing on is to grow out the ecosystem.
In a bear market, people tend to be much more mission driven and willing to objectively consider what is the best technology for them to be building on rather than going to the ecosystem that just seem to be the most short-term lucrative places for them to launch a project on.
Sei has more than 100 projects that are committed to build ahead of the mainnet.
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Why build on Cosmos?
First considered building a roll-up like ZK or Optimistic where it bundles transactions and sends it into a Ethereum L1 in order to scale but there were also a lot of projects built within Ethereum that made it non-ideal for an exchange to scale on top of it.
Also considered using subnets on Avalanche but the main downside is they can’t change the consensus level.
Cosmos has the most modular stack out there to get a chain up and running quickly then be able to make modifications to enable better performance down the line.
Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, IBC and VM
It boils down to the modifications and the first one is Twin Turbo Consensus which has been the biggest thing that decreased the time to finality.
Parallelization has been extremely helpful for being able to process transactions more quickly, also decreasing the time to finality and increasing throughput.
IBC is one of the most important parts of getting off the ground.
Sei Network is IBC compatible and they didn’t change how block headers and clients work.
The current VM that is supported is CosmWasm.
They’re only building the L1 infrastructure and not building any applications on top.
Appchain theory in Cosmos
Looking at the distribution of L1s out there, they fall under two extremes, one is the general purpose chains like Ethereum and Solana, and on the other hand, application specific ones like Osmosis and dYdX v4.
With the appchain approach, they get customizability and they’re able to build the best possible infrastructure for the type of problem that they’re able to solve.
In a general purpose approach, the biggest benefit is the social coordination piece of it.
The approach that they’re taking right now is they’ve created this specialized infrastructure that is going to give them the best of both worlds.
How is Sei different from Osmosis and dYdX?
Osmosis and dYdX are building applications or DEXs and Sei is building infrastructure.
The applications that are going to be successful will be those that are doing something entirely different than what other teams in the Cosmos ecosystem have already been building.
Approach on MEV
There’s different types of MEV, there’s frontrunning which is considered bad, then there’s liquidation and arbitrage which they consider to be acceptable and unavoidable MEV.
Frontrunning causes users to get the worst price of assets which is harmful but riskless profit for a validator.
Sei is using frequent batch auctions to help with frontrunning for anything that is related to the order book.
Frequent batch auctions aggregates every single market order at the end of the block then they will execute all those market orders at the same uniform clearing price.
Alpha
Started the incentivized testnet in July.
Launched the Atlantic 1 chain and going to be launching the Atlantic 2 chain soon,
Started the audit recently and planning to launch sometime in Q1 next year.
1% of the token supply is reserved for people who participated in the incentivized testnet as rewards.
Check out these important links
The only thing that develops faster than crypto tech is crypto tech news. It's easy for important headlines to get lost in the shuffle.
Blockbytes Weekly is your edge on the news cycle. Get weekly summaries of the most important stories developing on the most important networks straight to your inbox.
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