Sei is built as a general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain that focuses on trading, which is a critical and widely adopted use case in the Web3 ecosystem. Trading extends beyond decentralized finance (DeFi) and touches various sectors, such as gaming, NFTs, and social applications. Sei’s goal is to create a blockchain infrastructure tailored for trading applications, allowing them to achieve mass adoption.
Key Features of Sei
Twin-Turbo Consensus: Sei introduces enhancements to the block propagation and processing mechanisms. This includes intelligent block propagation, where validators share only transaction identifiers initially, followed by full block propagation. Validators reconstruct blocks based on their local mempools, significantly reducing the time required to receive and validate blocks.
Optimistic Block Processing: Validators begin processing block data concurrently with the consensus process, which Sei reduces latency by starting execution before the block is fully committed.
In addition, it leverages parallelization to enhance performance. Specifically, Sei uses parallel transaction processing. By utilizing dependency mappings and a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to manage transaction dependencies, it can process multiple transactions simultaneously. This reduces bottlenecks and increases throughput.
Another key feature is its native price oracles. In this system, validators act as price oracles, ensuring accurate and up-to-date exchange rate pricing for various assets. To achieve this, a weighted median of oracle submissions is computed to determine asset prices, and penalties are imposed on validators who provide inaccurate data.
Furthermore, Sei includes a native order matching engine designed for decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on the platform. This engine supports frequent batch auctioning, where market orders are aggregated and executed at a uniform clearing price.
As a result, it reduces Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) exploits by validators. One of the engine’s strengths is its asset-agnostic matching capability. This means it does not require assets to be tokenized, giving DEXs the flexibility to represent assets as needed.
Lastly, Sei optimizes performance through transaction bundling. It does so by bundling orders from multiple markets into one transaction and using chain-level bundling, which reduces virtual machine (VM) instantiations. In turn, this decreases latency during periods of high throughput.
Applications and Ecosystem
Sei is positioned as a sector-specific Layer 1 blockchain that can support a wide range of applications, including decentralized exchanges, DeFi protocols, gaming platforms, and NFT marketplaces. The blockchain provides customizable infrastructure for developers to build trading apps while ensuring optimal performance and scalability.
Conclusion
Sei is designed to solve the unique challenges that trading applications face on existing Layer 1 blockchains, offering a specialized infrastructure that improves transaction speed, scalability, and reliability. Its parallelized transaction processing, native order matching engine, and price oracle system make it an ideal platform for the next generation of decentralized trading applications.