Sei Network - the FASTEST Cosmos Chain

Sei Network - the FASTEST Cosmos chain | In this episode, Cryptocito interviewed Jay - the co-founder of Sei Network, the first sector-specific layer-1 blockchain specialized for trading with 0.6s finality. The episode can be viewed here.

1. Background of Jay & Sei Network (1:32)

• Got into crypto in 2017 and spent 4 years working at Robinhood.

• Went through GameStop crisis and became on-chain maxi ⇒ Started building a decentralized Robinhood.

2. Background of Sei Network

• Mission of Sei: Build the best infrastructure for exchanges ⇒ identical to CEX experience.

• Started with Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Core and added in:

  • Twin Turbo consensus: 0.3-0.6 s finality compared to 6s from other Cosmos chains.

  • Parallelization: 22000 TPS.

  • Native order matching engine: help scale and prevent front running.

3. How Jay dealing with the current market sentiment? (Celsius, 3AC, FTX… collapsed) (6:52)

• This confirmed Jay’s thesis.

• Bull market: many teams are money-driven || Bear market: teams are mission-driven and choose the best tech.

• Have > 100 projects commit building on Sei.

• No grants right now ⇒ teams build on Sei because of the technology.

4. Team size (9:26)

• 21 folks with different backgrounds:

  • 9 Engineers mostly from Robinhood.

  • Cosmos OG - Dan Edlebeck (@deeeedle).

  • Tradfi.

5. Why Cosmos? (9:54)

• Consider 3 main categories:

  • Rollup: Production-ready on Ethereum but do not scale because data need to be written on the L1 chain.

  • Shared security approach (Avax Subnet, Polkdadot Parachain, Cosmos Consumer chain): can’t change the consensus level.

  • Choose Sovereign chain with Twin Turbo consensus.

• Choose Cosmos SDK because it is the most modular stack to start a chain and can make modifications for better performance.

6. Architecture design of Sei Network (13:00)

• Twin Turbo consensus: Decrease time to finality by implementing:

  • Intelligent block propagation.

  • Optimistic block processing.

• Parallelization: Decreasing time to finality and increasing throughput.

• Work with Zaki (@zmanian) & Marko (@mark0baricevic) to tweak the Tendermint configuration.

• Details can be read this thread where Jay breakdown the Sei Network whitepaper.

7. Is IBC a crucial element? (14:38)

• One of the most important pieces to get liquidity into Sei.

• Sei is IBC-compatible.

8. Explain sector-specific chain and how the app-chain theory playout (16:00)

• Current all Layer 1 chains fall under 2 extremes:

  • General purpose chain e.g. Ethereum & Solana.

    • Pros: Social coordination aspect (community involvement) & credible neutrality (no conflict with Dapps).

  • Application-specific chain: Osmosis & dYdX v4.

    • Pros: Customizability & ability to build the best infrastructure for the type of problems you want to solve.

• Both approaches have pros and cons ⇒ Sei Network decided to go in the middle by creating specialized infrastructure optimized for DeFi.

• Read more on this here and here.

9. What is the VM that Sei deploying? (19:18)

• Dapps built on top of Sei would be writing smart contracts:

  • Vanilla smart contract for AMM.

  • Special smart contract to make use of the Sei order matching engine module.

• Current supported VM: Cosmwasm || Future: language agnostic.

10. “Killer” applications on Sei? (20:40)

• Over 100 teams are building on Sei.

• Nitro SVM: optimistic rollup on Sei with Solana VM and will bring many Solana team to Cosmos.

• Jay is bullish on teams that are making use of Sei’s native order matching engine because it can’t be built elsewhere.

• Interesting ideas to build: Prediction market - will be announced on Sei’s Twitter soon.

11. How Sei differentiates from Osmosis & dYdX (23:55)

• Osmosis & dYdX are building applications (DEX).

• Sei is building infrastructure ⇒ no direct competition.

• Successful applications on Sei will not be similar to Osmosis (Spot exchange) or dYdX (perpetual exchange) but entirely different from what other teams on Cosmos have already been building.

12. Game plan for MEV on Sei (24:58)

• Bad MEV: Frontrunning.

• Acceptable and unavoidable MEV: Liquidation & arbitrage.

• Want to stop bad MEV and redistribution to good MEV. How?

  • Frequent-batch auction: Sei aggregates all orders in a block together at the end of the block, and then fills them at the same price.

  • Work with Skip Protocol (@SkipProtocol) & Mekatek (@meka_t3k) teams to set up MEV redistribution.

• Read more on MEV here by @FarmerTuHao.

13. How many validators are there on testnet and on genesis? (29:30)

• Active set of 50 validators with >2000 validators that want to join the active set on testnet.

• Still optimize the configurations.

14. Role of Sei token & Airdrop (30:03)

• Launch Q1 2023.

• Incentivized testnet start in July and still going on. 1% of the token supply will be airdrop as rewards.

• Participating in the incentivized testnet by:

  • Trading on Dapps that building on Sei or

  • Setting up a validator.

• Recently launch Dusk and Dawn NFTs campaign (link) for early adopters.