Altcoin Sei (SEI) was the best-performing top 100 crypto asset in today’s trading, jumping 46.5% to $0.2855 in the past 24 hours, per CoinGecko data. Today’s impressive performance builds on its momentum from earlier in the week; SEI is up over 72% in the past seven days.
SEI is the native token of the Sei Network, a Cosmos-based Layer 1 blockchain launched in August 2023, specifically designed to catering to the needs of decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
The altcoin’s price surge comes after the Wyoming Stable Token Commission selected Sei as a candidate blockchain for its upcoming dollar-pegged stablecoin, WYST, earlier this week. It will face competition from rival blockchains Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Stellar, Solana, and Sui.
The state, which first proposed plans to issue its own stablecoin via a state bill in February 2022, announced an August target release date for the token earlier this week, which would make Wyoming the first US state to launch its own stablecoin.
However, the initiative is still facing plenty of political opposition from some Republican lawmakers, who have raised negative comparisons between the project and a government-issued CBDC.
Analysts told Decrypt that aside from the impact of the show of faith from Wyoming, SEI has displayed impressive gains to its underlying ecosystem in recent weeks.
Illia Otychenko, Lead Analyst at exchange CEX.IO, told Decrypt that “over the past two months, SEI has also shown strong on-chain growth, with daily active addresses up 180% and daily transactions rising by 20%.”
He added that, “This momentum could help SEI support some of the recent price gains.”
The project’s Total Value Locked (TVL) now stands at $542.17 million as per DeFiLlama, up around 200% since the start of March this year.
Rajiv Sawhney, Head of International Portfolio Management at Wave Digital Assets International, highlighted that asset manager Canary Capital filed for SEI ETF in May, which would make it much easier for institutional investors to get exposure. Sawhney feels investors could be speculating on the altcoin based on the possibility of a potential approval from the SEC.
