The Sei v2 Public Devnet is here
If you are thinking about building on Sei, or already are, let us know about your project here.
The first milestone in the journey to a highly performant EVM future is here. The sei arctic-1 Devnet has been upgraded to "v2", supporting a high performance, parallelized EVM.
Developers may now begin testing and refining their applications, in a fully permissionless environment. Get started here.
If the Sei v2 proposal is accepted, it will mark the first meaningful step from single threaded to a multi-threaded, highly performant, fully parallel EVM blockchain future. By deploying a fully bytecode compatible EVM chain, that is capable of handling thousands of transactions per second and finalizing in under 400ms, this upgrade unlocks the ability for Ethereum developers to build massively scalable consumer grade applications.
What is this?
This devnet release is a call to action for developers and innovators to begin to explore the capabilities of Sei, providing a comprehensive testing ground for decentralized applications. In the spirit of building in the open, this phase is instrumental in refining the network, preparing deployments, and ensuring that Sei’s new EVM is ready for a seamless transition to Mainnet.
Users are free to join and contribute to this process, however they should be aware that it is not fully representative of the final Mainnet experience. Some measures are in place to ensure network stability, such as block gas limits, which will limit theoretical tps to below its maximum. Additionally, applications and wallets originally built on Ethereum may not be optimized for Sei, and will not refresh as fast as Sei allows. You can always verify Sei's speed and time to finality directly on https://seitrace.com/
As developers begin their deployments on this Devnet and eventually Mainnet, the number of apps will scale with it. While you should keep your eyes peeled for deployments coming in the following weeks, a small number of early applications have deployed already, which can be found here.
Why the EVM?
One thing is clear - the EVM is here to stay. It has terminal velocity, and it’s extremely unlikely for the EVM to lose its majority market share in the near future. This is similar to Javascript in web2 - even though it might not be the most optimized language, it has significant support so its the default that devs use.
However, the current issue with the EVM is that it lacks a highly performant, scalable option for developers. On Eth L1 and Eth rollups, you can’t get more than 30 sustained transactions per second. For some usecases this is sufficient, however, this limits the design space on Ethereum, since many applications need to submit more than 30 TPS.
Sei will provide a new option for developers, by upgrading to Sei v2, the first high performance parallelized EVM. A parallelized EVM lets you get the best of Ethereum and Solana - the EVM and all of the existing development work and infrastructure around it, now unlocked by the kind of performant execution environment that Solana offers.
Parallelizing the EVM which will serve as a potential scaling approach for the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Sei provides the fastest time to finality of any blockchain at sub 400ms, and thousands of tps, all while ensuring node requirements remain modest by optimizing every layer of the stack.
The Sei Labs team is hopeful that the Ethereum community can one day leverage the open source codebase of Sei to achieve new possibilities for scaling, and looks forward to a future where Ethereum, Sei, and the Layer 2s can all help Ethereum scale.
Why should Users Care?
Have you ever wondered, what it would be like if your favourite Ethereum applications inherited the performance of Solana - how would that change your experience? Sei’s v2 upgrade stands to deliver this and more.
If Sei is successful, then applications will be able to offer nearly the same UX as any Web2 competitor, and that is incredibly powerful.
In the near term, through backwards compatibility with existing Ethereum smart contracts, Sei v2 allows for a new option for developers, via seamless deployment of existing dApps onto this highly scalable platform. This backward compatibility is crucial for developers looking to leverage Sei's enhanced performance without the need to rewrite or significantly modify their existing codebases.
In the longer term, Sei aims to unlock a wide array of application possibilities for developers that were not previously possible on EVM chains, from complex decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to high-performance gaming, NFT and interactive web applications. This is accomplished through technical advancements in optimistic concurrency control, high performance database design and consensus mechanism optimizations, making Sei a truly “next generation” high performance blockchain, boasting 100x improvements when compared to existing EVM blockchains.
There are a number of other improvements beyond just parallelizing the evm that are included in this upgrade:
Features:
Sei v2 will unlock a number of features that improve developer and user experiences across every part of Sei’s tech stack:
- Interoperable EVM: This allows existing developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to deploy their applications, tooling and infrastructure to Sei with no changes, while benefiting from the 100x performance improvements offered by Sei. Sei will still support Cosmwasm, as a second execution environment on the same blockchain.
- Optimistic Parallelization: This feature allows developers to unlock parallel processing for their applications, with no additional work. This is similar to how Solana has scaled its throughput; Ethereum developers can now also build out parallelized workflows for the first time.
- SeiDB: This major upgrade allows Sei to handle the much higher rate of data storage, reads and writes which become extremely important for a high performance blockchain. Not only does this facilitate huge performance improvements, for developers and specifically node operators, this means rapid state sync, and reduced hardware requirements through reducing state bloat. Read more here.
- Twin Turbo Consensus: This feature allows Sei to reach the fastest time to finality of any blockchain at 400ms, unlocking web2 like experiences for applications. This is just slower than the average human reaction time, and Sei Labs want to push things even faster in future.
All these features combine to unlock a brand new, scalable design space for the Ethereum Ecosystem.
Who is using Sei right now?
Sei’s mainnet has already seen the first stages of a thriving ecosystem, built on Cosmwasm.
There are thousands of NFT holders who have already made Sei their home, and multiple projects that have formed their own communities even prior to the launch of this Devnet with tens of thousands of engaged users. There are podcasts, twitter spaces, community tools, public goods and an excited group of crypto-natives ready to go.
Teams who have deployed contracts and tokens on Sei already, will be able to run a simple upgrade to become fully interoperable between both EVM and WASM. Details on how this works and how to implement this for your current Sei project will be released in the coming weeks - if you would like to expediate this process, please get in touch with the Sei Labs or Foundation teams.
It’s time for Ethereum to go beyond.
To learn more, check out Sei’s socials below.
If you are a developer and have a bug or finding on sei devnet to report directly, you may do so here
You can verify information about activity on Sei via third party dashboards here:
New users: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/saeedmzn/new-users-on-sei-new-users-on-sei-xCbORs
Inscriptions: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/hess/sei-inscription-sei-inscription-bXHkDN
Swaps: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/hess/sei-swaps-30-d-sei-swaps-30d-GEAJmg
NFT activity: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/saeedmzn/pallet-nft-marketplace-pallet-nft-marketplace-oWMD0j