Research
Sei Research Initiative
A first-principles approach to reimagining the EVM across all layers—storage, consensus, and execution. This research initiative, which includes contributions from thought leaders at Sei Labs, the Sei Foundation, and the broader industry, embraces open-source principles, following the same philosophy that guides Sei Protocol’s code development.
We welcome cross-pollination of ideas and invite the crypto community to contribute, so the entire EVM ecosystem can benefit from this open source R&D.
30 entries
Hermes will bring fast and stable finality to Sei GigaSei Giga is being built to become the ultimate high-performance trading blockchain. Hermes is the consensus end goal for that vision, combining the speed of the fastest leader-based protocols with a fallback that ensures fast finality even when a leader is slow or offline.Today’s…Giga · ConsensusREAD →Finality Before Disclosure for Ledger Authenticators in the Quantum Random Oracle ModelThis paper is hosted on arXiv. Read the original paper on arXiv.Quantum · ConsensusARXIV ↗A mechanism design overview of SednaSedna's mempool privacy holds up as an economic guarantee. It hides each transaction by shattering it into coded fragments across parallel proposals, so no single party can read the transaction before its order is irreversible. Paired with a mechanism that rewards proposers that…Sedna · MEVREAD →SIP-5: a post-quantum upgrade path for SeiSIP-5 is the proposed post-quantum upgrade path for Sei. It is not an immediate plan, but rather a proposed way for the network to move to quantum-safe signatures before a quantum computer can break the cryptography that EVM accounts rely on today. Under SIP-5 every existing…QuantumREAD →Encrypting the mempool can make perpetual funding easier to attackEncrypted mempools and private transaction layers like Sei Giga's Sedna stop most front-running, but they can also raise the risk of funding rate manipulation. When an attacker authors the transaction that moves a funding input, encryption blinds the arbitrageurs who would…MEVREAD →Sedna versus the world: MEV protection without the encryption tax.Okay maybe not the world. But the world of encrypted mempools for sure. Sei Research Initiative has previously spoken about Sedna [1] and how it approximates an encrypted mempool in some settings but we’ve treated it relatively hand wavily so far. Today we’ll spend a bit of time…Sedna · MEVREAD →Sedna: Mempool Privacy Without EncryptionCrypto has spent years trying to fix the mempool. We have dark pools running on the side of the core infra. We have a bunch of literature, especially as of late, on how to build encrypted mempools. The reason for it is pretty clear, even if a large portion of the community…Sedna · MEVREAD →What MPP Can Learn From Lightning NetworkBy Alejandro Ranchal-PedrosaTempo's MPP Sessions have put payment channel networks back in the spotlight, this time for agentic, machine-to-machine payments on EVM chains rather than human purchases on Bitcoin. I co-authored the first papers demonstrating balance deanonymization…AIREAD →Part 2: Finality Is a Lie (That We All Agree On)By Alejandro Ranchal-PedrosaNote: This is Part 2 of Finality Is a Lie (That We All Agree On). For Part 1, see here.Making finality measurable: Economic security and the Nakamoto CoefficientThe definition above is qualitative. Two quantities make it measurable: the cost to corrupt…ConsensusREAD →Finality is a Lie (That We All Agree On)By Alejandro Ranchal-PedrosaAbstractFinality in blockchains is often presented as an objective milestone, but in practice it is a spectrum of trust assumptions that vary by protocol, observer, and economic context. This article contextualizes finality as credible commitments made…ConsensusREAD →The Generations of Consensus: From Safety-first to Instant FinalityAbstractThe evolution of distributed consensus, at the heart of any blockchain system, has led to a multi-generational quest to push the limits of the blockchain trilemma, the (alleged) impossibility of simultaneously guaranteeing security, scalability, and decentralization.…ConsensusREAD →Revenue Sharing is Equilibrium: Why Stablecoins Will (and Should) Pass Through YieldAbstractStablecoin 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 one credible issuer and one click on-chain…Stablecoins · EconomicsREAD →Solana’s Alpenglow: A Faster Consensus with New Trade-OffsBy 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…ConsensusREAD →The Invisible Hand of DeFiBy Vangelis, Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative. Special thanks to Niko for feedback and contributions.IntroductionIn 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,…MEVREAD →MEV with Multiple Concurrent ProposersBy Ben Marsh, Sei Labs Research for Sei Research InitiativeIntroductionWe previously went over the potential issues of public DA [Mar25] in Autobahn which touched on several MEV cases but that work failed to outline the full MEV landscape. Here we will introduce, informally, the…MEV · ConsensusREAD →The VM Landscape: Comparing Architectures for Next-Generation BlockchainsBy Vangelis, Ben Marsh- Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.IntroductionSince 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…ExecutionREAD →Crypto's New Math: From Narratives to REVBy Vangelis, Ben Marsh- Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.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…EconomicsREAD →Autobahn: Sei Giga's Multi-Proposer Approach to Blockchain ConsensusAutobahn: Sei Giga's Multi-Proposer Approach to Blockchain ConsensusBy Vangelis and Ben Marsh - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.IntroductionUnlike earlier PoS designs, Tendermint offered deterministic guarantees for consensus and eliminated the possibility of forks,…Giga · ConsensusREAD →Building the Robot Economy: DePIN Tokenization as Capital Formation for Embodied AIBuilding the Robot Economy: DePIN Tokenization as Capital Formation for Embodied AIBy Vangelis, Ben Marsh- Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.From unimodal to multimodal LLMsLLMs evolved from unimodal systems that process single data types (e.g., text) to multimodal…AIREAD →Proof of AI Agent will become even more critical than Proof of HumanityBy Ben Marsh, and Vangelis - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.Special thanks to DCbuilder, and Anastasios for feedback and discussions.When we last discussed the emergence of the next billion agents, we outlined an architectural framework to support this coming wave.…AIREAD →How Application-Specific Ordering Redistributes MEVBy Ben Marsh, Vangelis - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative. Special thanks to Marshall Vyletel, and Gurnoor for feedback and discussions.IntroductionBlockchain transaction ordering is a complex, high-stakes process. Block producers don't simply list transactions in…MEVREAD →Collaborative Intelligence: Performant Blockchains Powering Private, Democratically-Governed AIBy Ben Marsh - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative.Federated Learning (FL) and blockchain technology are emerging as a powerful combination for building decentralized AI systems. In FL, multiple devices or organizations collaboratively train an AI model without sharing…AIREAD →AI: The Monetization Layer of Blockchain – Onboarding the Next Billion-AgentsBy Ben Marsh, and Vangelis - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research Initiative Special thanks to Evan for feedback and discussions.The Next Billion Users: AI Agents, Not HumansIt seems that every week there’s a new major announcement in AI. We’re clearly standing at the threshold of…AIREAD →Sei Giga: Achieving 5 Gigagas with Autobahn ConsensusThe Sei Labs team were able to get 5 gigagas throughput in a 40-node network distributed across 4 regions in an internal devnet.This is a significant step forward in our mission to scale blockchain infrastructure for the next billion users.This post is the first in a series…Giga · ConsensusREAD →Unleashing AI Agents: How Blockchain Enables True Digital AutonomyImagine the day when you wake up on a summer morning and the dull repetitive aspects of your life are already handled for you and all you have to worry about is doing whatever you want to do. Your AI agents are trading on your behalf and managing your portfolio, your AI agent is…AIREAD →Optimizing ECDSA Signature Verification: Exploring Zero-Knowledge Proofs in the Sei Giga BlockchainFollowing Sei Protocol’s recent Giga announcement outlining the path to achieving 5 gigagas per second on the EVM, we identified several key areas for optimization. One bottleneck in the existing Sei Giga protocol prototype that jumped out was the issue of signature recovery and…GigaREAD →From Deep Web to Deep Learning: The Props RevolutionBy Ben Marsh - Sei Labs Research for Sei Research InitiativeSpecial thanks to Jake, and Naman for feedback and discussions.The Sei blockchain is not just another high performance network. It is the bedrock on which new, trust-anchored data solutions can thrive. Approximately 95%…AIREAD →64.85% of Ethereum Transactions Can Be ParallelizedSpecial thanks to Yannis, Gurnoor, Pavel, Ren, Lefteris, and Evan for feedback and discussions.IntroductionIn this post, we'll clarify the concepts of sequential, concurrent, and parallel execution in blockchains, highlight the differences between dependent and independent…ExecutionREAD →Scaling the EVM from First Principles: Reimagining the Storage LayerSpecial thanks to Philippe Dumonet, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Patryk Krasnicki, dcbuilder.eth, Evan Pappas, Rishin Sharma, Anastasios Andronidis, for feedback and discussions.IntroductionThe storage layer of blockchain virtual machines is critical as it manages persistent data…ExecutionREAD →Introducing the Sei Research InitiativeSei Labs and the Sei Foundation are opening up the dialogue with third party researchers, thought leaders and external contributors to explore the limits of the EVM under the Sei Research Initiative.The Sei Research Initiative shares Vitalik's view that Ethereum's multi-client…ExecutionREAD →