Sei co-founder Jeff Feng (in image) talks Web3 gaming. | Credit: Hameem Sarwar/CCN.com
* Sei has over $630 million in TVL, over 41 million wallets created, and 1 million daily active users.
* Its prowess in Web3 gaming was “incidental” and not a “designed pivot.”
* Sei’s upcoming “Giga” upgrade could see 50x throughput improvements, amongst other major performance boosts.
Sei has quickly become one of the most recognized chains in Web3 gaming, but its success was incidental in this field. Sei’s real aim is — simply put — to be the fastest, most scalable blockchain for real-world applications.
To understand Sei’s real mission, CCN spoke with Sei Labs co-founder, Jeff Feng.
High-Performance
Sei didn’t start out as the Web3 gaming titan it is today; this was more incidental than a “designed pivot.”
Sei Labs was founded on the thesis that the exchange of digital assets “is the most fundamental use case” for blockchain technology, Feng said.
Its goal was to create a powerful network that could lay the groundwork for developers to build the next generation of on-chain apps with a high-performance asset exchange.
“Gaming naturally fits into this because games are fundamentally about digital asset exchange, whether that’s in-game items, NFTs, or tokens,” he said.
As a result, Sei has been adopted en masse, with a staggering $636 million in total value locked (TVL) , over 41 million wallets, and a recent milestone of 1 million daily active users.
“That level of traction speaks for itself,” Feng noted.
“The growth we’ve seen across the ecosystem goes beyond gaming. Sei is building the infrastructure that is enabling new use cases across AI, gaming, and institutional finance while maintaining speed and scalability,” he added.
Feng explained that “even the best on-chain exchanges” struggled to compete with the speed and efficiency of centralized ones, so delivering “the most performant chain possible” became the broader mission.
Building a “truly differentiated infrastructure” without sacrificing accessibility for developers was one of Sei’s biggest challenges, Feng noted.
“We didn’t want to fork an existing chain or make marginal improvements. From day one, the goal was to rethink how blockchains can support high-performance, real-world applications,” he said.
That required a “technically ambitious” approach, which included creating a new execution layer, a multi-proposer consensus, and other innovations.
“But it’s also what allowed Sei to deliver sub-400ms finality and exceptionally high throughput today — with the upcoming Sei Giga upgrade set to scale further. It’s performance that few other chains can match,” Feng said.
Web3 gaming’s modern era will push blockchain technology to its limits as it employs a complex weave of crypto, payouts, airdrops, NFTs , DeFi, governance, and every in-game interaction.
Infrastructure
For Feng, Sei’s success in Web3 gaming is proof that its tech stack is equally suited for institutional finance, AI, and other real-time, data-intensive applications.
Feng explained that while gaming first highlighted Sei’s performance advantages, institutional finance apps, stablecoins, AI-driven platforms, and “complex DeFi protocols” are now adopting Sei “for the same reason.”
“AI agents, for example, need to transact, coordinate, and negotiate in milliseconds. Traditional blockchains simply can’t support that kind of activity at scale,” he said.
Sei’s current architecture already delivers near-instant finality, and the upcoming “Giga upgrade” is set to introduce 50x faster execution, 70x faster block production, and 40x faster finality — unlocking use cases that “weren’t possible before,” Feng said.
“Cutting through the noise in a crowded Layer-1 landscape has been challenging. There are a lot of chains making similar claims to Sei, but what helped us stand out was real-world usage,” he added.
Web3 Gaming
One of Sei’s breakout successes is World of Dypians, an open-world, sandbox-style MMORPG featuring AI-powered companions, NFT land, and more.
It’s among 2025’s most ambitious launches, joining the likes of Star Atlas, Cross the Ages, MapleStory N, and Illuvium — titles positioning themselves as expansive gaming universes with multiple ways to play.
So why build on Sei?
According to Feng, competing gaming chains like Ronin, Sui, or Immutable often require developers to learn new programming languages, adopt unfamiliar tooling, or accept significant performance trade-offs.
“With Sei, developers get the best of both worlds — they can use familiar Ethereum tools, wallets, and development environments without modification, while accessing 50x throughput improvements through Sei’s parallelized execution architecture,” he said.
Sei titles like World of Dypians or Europe Fantasy League demand real-time gameplay mechanics, “fair ordering,” and the ability to handle thousands of concurrent players.
However, as Feng emphasized, successful Sei titles “aren’t just Web3 games — they’re great games that happen to leverage blockchain technology in meaningful ways.”
That combination — top-tier performance without forcing developers to compromise on tools or experience — has been a key driver of Sei’s growth in Web3 gaming.
High Stakes
For a while, Web3 gaming remained a niche within the crypto ecosystem, with only a handful of early hits — like Axie Infinity and The Sandbox — managing to stand the test of time.
It’s a notoriously tough industry, with an estimated 75% of Web3 gaming projects failing between 2017 and 2023.
“Web3 gaming is one of the most ambitious use cases in crypto because it combines all the hardest problems at once: real-time performance, user experience, monetization, and scalability,” Feng said.
The sector’s early days on Ethereum spurred the creation of Layer-2 solutions to bypass those bottlenecks. However, as technical demands grew, Layer-1s purpose-built for gaming began to emerge.
“One of the early challenges was simply showing developers that blockchain infrastructure could support the kinds of high-frequency, latency-sensitive gameplay that modern games require,” Feng explained. “Most blockchains couldn’t. That’s why so many early Web3 games were turn-based or heavily abstracted.”
Sei’s infrastructure was originally built for asset trading and high-throughput DeFi, “but developers found their way to us,” Feng said.
The upcoming Giga upgrade and commitment to full EVM compatibility “are making a huge difference,” he added.
That foundation has powered breakout titles like World of Dypians and Europe Fantasy League — though, as Feng admits, “there’s still plenty of work to do.”
Sei’s Priorities
In the immediate future, Feng said Sei will focus on optimizing its EVM capabilities and expanding ecosystem support.
This includes pushing forward with its newly launched AI “accelathon,” which supports developers building AI tools and infrastructure on the network.
“On the technical side, growing the number of active builders and live applications is a top priority,” he explained. “With full EVM compatibility and the upcoming Giga upgrade, we’re seeing increased interest from EVM-native teams — leading to more migration and multi-chain deployment activity than ever before.”
It’s a team effort that extends to collaborations with DeFi and real-world asset (RWA) projects.
“Most notably,” Feng said, “is Ondo’s plan to bring its tokenized U.S. Treasury Bills product, USDY, onto Sei.
This represents a major milestone in Sei’s ecosystem development that brings institutional-grade RWAs to the fastest L1 blockchain, and signals a recognition of institutional readiness.”
Circle’s USDC stablecoin and its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP V2) have also been deployed on Sei — partnerships, Feng believes, could serve as major catalysts for both institutional and retail adoption.
“We’re also supporting developers directly through ecosystem grants and targeted initiatives like the AI Accelathon and the $65 million DeSci Fund, which aim to seed long-term innovation across high-growth verticals,” he added.
In short, the goal isn’t “just vanity metrics,” Feng stressed. It’s about creating an ecosystem ready to power real-world applications at scale. “Everything we’re doing this year is to support this goal.”
Early Days?
Feng said high-performance blockchains — those that can scale, process massive volumes of transactions quickly, and maintain low latency with high throughput — are only just beginning to show their full potential.
First-generation crypto applications proved that decentralized infrastructure works. The next generation, he explained, will prove it can outperform the systems we rely on every day.
“What excites us most is seeing developers create things that simply weren’t feasible a year ago,” Feng said. “That includes games with real-time interactions, AI agents that can transact on-chain, and financial products that move seamlessly across networks with near-instant finality.”
It’s no longer a far-fetched idea, he added — “they’re already live and growing on Sei.”
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