People are looking for the next Solana, and Sei is considered to have the best chance of becoming its potential stock.

Recently, the price increase of Sei's native token SEI has attracted attention. Yesterday, SEI broke through the historical high, reaching $0.8, and increased nearly four times in two weeks. The community can't help but wonder, the airdrop is not much, and the price of the coin has been tepid, why did Sei become popular at the beginning of 2024?

Why did SEI rise?

Parallel EVM Narrative

On August 15, 2023, the Sei mainnet was launched. On November 29, Sei released its V2 strategic plan on social media, saying that Sei previously used Cosmwasm smart contracts written in Rust. As Sei attracts more developer interest, the execution environment supported by Sei needs greater flexibility. To this end, Sei Labs launched the first such solution to create the first parallel EVM.

Sei consists of different software components that work together to support the blockchain. Some of these components are related to the consensus layer, others to the execution layer. Sei V2 will change the way the execution layer works to support Optimistic parallelization and optimized state storage. Additionally, it will create a new component to support EVM smart contracts. These EVM smart contracts will benefit from all the changes made to consensus and parallelization, and will also be able to interact with existing Cosmwasm smart contracts.

Sei officials said that the parallel EVM strategic proposal recognizes the current dominance of EVM and creates a familiar and enhanced environment for most blockchain developers, tools, and libraries. Use Sei to enhance Ethereum and Eth L2 applications. Compared with the existing EVM blockchain, this enables applications to support more users and more interactive experiences comparable to Web2.

Related reading: "Detailed explanation of Sei V2's parallel EVM logic and narrative"

Jayendra (Jay), co-founder of Sei Labs, posted on social media that Sei v2 will also be able to call EVM and Cosmwasm contracts through the use of stateful precompilation and chain-level message scheduling. After the review is completed, the upgrade will be released in the public testnet in the first quarter of 2024 and will be deployed to the mainnet in the first half of 2024.

Ethereum's Cancun upgrade is one of the most anticipated events in the crypto space in the first quarter of 2024, and the narrative of blockchain performance optimization related to it will also receive more attention and expectations. The main players in parallel EVM are Monad, Neon, and Sei. Monad currently has no coin issuance plan, and Neon is supported by the official Solana team, with a monthly increase of nearly 6 times; and Sei, as a parallel EVM concept coin that can also be traded on mainstream CEX, it is expected that it will get a price pump at this time.

Strong capital background

Sei collided with Paradigm, which focuses on the parallel EVM technology narrative, and also attracted a lot of attention.

On December 12, 2023, Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos tweeted that 2024 will be the "year of parallel EVM" and said that Paradigm is also exploring and designing related technologies. He mentioned Monad, Sei, and Polygon in the post, and many crypto KOLs in the comment section also discussed parallel EVM.

Although Paradigm did not invest in Sei, Sei's financing background is already very luxurious.

In August 2022, Sei Labs, the team behind Sei Network, completed a $5 million seed round of financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, GSR, and others. In February 2023, Sei announced that it was conducting a Series A financing of $400 million and said it had an airdrop plan. In April, Sei Network announced that it had completed $30 million in financing at a valuation of $800 million, with participation from Jump Capital, Distributed Global, Multicoin Capital, Bixin Ventures, and others. This round of funds was used for development and market promotion in the Asia-Pacific region. In the same month, Sei Labs Ecological Fund completed a new round of financing of $50 million, with participation from Bitget and Foresight Ventures. In November 2023, Circle made a strategic investment in Sei Network to support the network's launch of native USDC

It can be seen that Sei's capital background has expanded from Europe and the United States to Asia-Pacific.

In early August 2023, Binance launched two Launchpool projects at the same time, one of which was Sei (SEI). On August 15, after the Sei mainnet was launched, Binance also opened SEI/BTC, SEI/USDT, and SEI/BNB trading markets at 20:00 on the same day. For a period of time afterwards, SEI did not experience significant price fluctuations.

In December 2023, Sei sponsored Binance's Maldives event, and it was from then on that Sei began to show signs of rising prices. Crypto KOLs who participated in Binance's event also said that they had found Binance's wealth code.

According to CoinGecko data, on January 2, the price of SEI rose to $0.8, an increase of 230% from $0.23 on December 18, 2023. As of press time, the price of SEI has fallen back to $0.71, a 24-hour drop of 4.9%.

What are the opportunities on Sei?

Since Sei has entered the first wave of price increases, combined with its V2 upgrade next year, there is still a lot to look forward to in the future Sei ecosystem. BlockBeats has compiled Sei’s content on memes, NFTs, and airdrop interactions for readers’ reference.

Tools

To play memes on Sei, the essential tools are Coinhall and Compass wallets. Coinhall provides real-time prices, charts, swap aggregation and analysis for all AMM DEXs in the Juno, Near and Cosmos ecosystems. Its role is equivalent to Birdeye in the Solana ecosystem, while Compass is like Solana's Phantom wallet. The largest DEX in the Sei network is Astroport, which is equivalent to Raydium in the Solana ecosystem. Meme transactions can be carried out on it.

meme

SEIYAN is the most popular Saiyan meme on Sei, because the social media avatar of Sei's co-founder Jay is a Saiyan. According to Coinhall data, as of the time of writing, the price of SEIYAN is $0.05, with a 7-day increase of 113%.

SENSEI is the second most popular meme on Coinhall today. It is a homophone of the Japanese word for "Mr.". According to Coinhall data, as of the time of writing, the price of SENSEI is $0.002, with a 7-day increase of 62%.

NFT

There are two major NFT trading markets on Sei, one is Pallet and the other is Dagora. Due to Pallet's website flow control measures, it takes a certain amount of waiting time to enter the website. The most popular NFT project on Sei is The Colony, followed by Seiyans, which just completed Free Mint last week.

The Colony is a popular NFT series among major teams in the Sei network, and holders will also receive airdrops of new projects in the Sei network. According to Pallet market data, as of writing, The Colony's floor price is 2450SEI, worth about $1,700.

Seiyans is a collection of Saiyan-related NFTs from Sei, which was minted publicly on December 28. Saiyans (Japanese: サイヤ人; English: Saiyan) are a fictional race in the famous work "Dragon Ball" by Japanese cartoonist Akira Toriyama. Since 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, Dragon Ball and Saiyans in Japanese culture have also gained hype space.

As of writing, the Seiyans floor is priced at 839 SEI, worth about $600, according to Pallet market data.

DeFi

1. Sei's native DEX Yaka Finance is about to be launched, and it is an open airdrop project. Currently, you can interact with it on its official website;

2. Kryptonite is a decentralized AMM and staking protocol based on Sei. Users can participate in its SEI liquidity staking activities.

3. Users can stake SEI in the Staking Hub with an APR of 4.68%. Referring to the style of airdrops issued by Cosmos projects, the first step to obtain future airdrops of Sei ecosystem projects is to stake SEI.