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The SIP-3 Upgrade: Making Way for Sei Giga

The SIP-3 Upgrade: Making Way for Sei Giga
Giga is coming and there are actions you need to take. Holders of USDC.n should migrate to native USDC or risk losing access to those assets. See this post for options to swap or migrate to native USDC.

Last May, the Sei community accepted SIP-3, a proposal to clear the way for Sei Giga by effectively deprecating the network’s CosmWasm and native Cosmos transactions. 

The road to Giga and 200k TPS starts here. To make a car go fast, you can either increase power or reduce weight. To make a car go really fast, you do both. SIP-3 is the weight reduction, and it will remove hundreds of thousands of lines of code from the Sei protocol.

This transition will require a series of network upgrades and governance proposals that will roll out over the coming months. These upgrades are expected to all be live on mainnet by mid-2026.

Once the transition is complete, Sei will be an EVM-only chain. In practical terms, it means that (1) only EVM addresses will be able to initiate transactions and (2) all Cosmos message handling will be removed and deprecated. 

The changes to these core aspects of the Sei protocol have wide-ranging implications for infrastructure providers, users, and application developers on the network. 

Here is what the Sei ecosystem needs to know about SIP-3, including the rollout of network releases, when they’re expected, and actions users and devs need to take over the coming months. 

Coming releases

In January and March, two network releases related to SIP-3 will be deployed to the Pacific testnet.

  • v6.3: This release allows stakers to access all staking functionality via the EVM, and allows indexers and custodians to properly receive changes to a user’s staked balance using EVM APIs.
  • v6.4: This release adds the ability to disable inbound IBC transfers. IBC is Cosmos’ native interoperability protocol. By disabling inbound transfers, users will no longer be able to bridge Cosmos-specific tokens such as Atom and USDC.n into Sei Network. Once the Sei protocol has this ability, Sei Labs will publish a governance proposal to formally disable these transfers.  

Additional releases will (1) add the ability to disable IBC outbound transfers and (2) disable Sei’s native oracle solution, which is replaced by established oracle infra providers, including Chainlink, API3, and Pyth.

We’ll share more information about the governance proposals for these releases as they become available, but the key thing to remember is this: these changes to the protocol do not take effect until approximately the end of Q1 2026. 

Transferring IBC assets

When v6.4 disables inbound IBC transfers, users will no longer be able to transfer assets like USDC.n and ATOM to Sei Network. In preparation for this, Sei Labs is recommending that all users holding IBC assets move them off of Sei as soon as possible. For those users holding IBC tokens in defi protocols, Sei Labs is recommending that users wind down any reliance on those assets. 

Holders of these assets may use a frontend like Skip:Go to accomplish this. The mention of this platform does not constitute an endorsement, and users should do their own research before using any third-party service.

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