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Sei Research Initiative

A first-principles approach to reimagine the EVM across all layers. All content produced by the Sei Research Initiative, a collaboration between Sei Labs, Sei Foundation, and the broader blockchain industry.

Revenue Sharing is Equilibrium: Why Stablecoins Will (and Should) Pass Through Yield

Revenue Sharing is Equilibrium: Why Stablecoins Will (and Should) Pass Through Yield

By Ben Marsh - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative Abstract Stablecoin issuers sit on a predictable carry stream from user float. That gravy train is ending, on Ethereum alone using our model nearly $5bn a year could, and should, be redistributed away from the issuer. With more than

Solana’s Alpenglow: A Faster Consensus with New Trade-Offs

Solana’s Alpenglow: A Faster Consensus with New Trade-Offs

By Vangelis, Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative. Solana's Alpenglow consensus upgrade promises to deliver 100x faster finality. Developed by Anza's research division led by ETH Zurich's Professor Roger Wattenhofer, this upgrade replaces Solana's signature Proof of History and Tower BFT

The Invisible Hand of DeFi

The Invisible Hand of DeFi

Introduction By Vangelis, Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative. Special thanks to Niko for feedback and contributions. In October 2023, the Ethereum Foundation lost $9,101 in a sandwich attack while swapping 1.7 ETH via Uniswap V3. The MEV bot frontran the transaction, extracting $4,060 in profit

Blockchain Bandits: How Public DA Creates New MEV Attack Vectors

Blockchain Bandits: How Public DA Creates New MEV Attack Vectors

By Ben Marsh, Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative. Introduction One of the notable things about Autobahn, the consensus protocol used in the Sei Giga proof of concept, is the existence of concurrent rather than sequential block production. When a validator is creating a block they are doing so

The VM Landscape: Comparing Architectures for Next-Generation Blockchains

The VM Landscape: Comparing Architectures for Next-Generation Blockchains

Introduction Since Vitalik’s post about RISC-V the different approaches to VMs have come back to the front of everyone’s mind. In this post we recap a handful of approaches, run over their technical underpinnings and highlight some pros and cons of the approaches. The approaches in this work

Crypto's New Math: From Narratives to REV

Crypto's New Math: From Narratives to REV

Market participants, humans (as long as AI is not conscious and follows humans’ intents), are ultimately the ones that determine the value of an asset and behavioral economics have proven that most humans do not act as rational agents. When we attempt to evaluate blockchain networks we often fall into

Autobahn: Sei Giga's Multi-Proposer Approach to Blockchain Consensus

Autobahn: Sei Giga's Multi-Proposer Approach to Blockchain Consensus

Introduction Unlike earlier PoS designs, Tendermint offered deterministic guarantees for consensus and eliminated the possibility of forks, which became a very influential model for modern PoS blockchains. However it still faces throughput limitations due to its single-proposer architecture. Sei Giga is using the Autobahn consensus mechanism, which is based on