Sei’s Built-in Order Matching Engine Makes It Possible for Apps to Instantly Spin Up Any Orderbook Market
Sei, the first layer 1 blockchain optimized for DeFi, today announced a $5 million funding round today led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Digital, Hudson River Trading, GSR, Hypersphere, Flow Traders, Kronos Research and the founders of Anchorage, Frax, Yield Guild Games, and Tangent.
The new capital will be used to support the network as it approaches mainnet launch and further accelerate the growth of over 20 dApps already building in the Sei ecosystem. Multicoin has previously played an instrumental role in the early growth of the Solana and Aptos ecosystems which made them the right partner for Sei.
Over the past three years, there has been a cambrian explosion in decentralized finance as new apps enable fundamental parts of the modern financial system to move onto the blockchain. These new DeFi apps serve to collapse legacy cost structures and expand financial access globally, yet the infrastructure to support these rapidly-scaling financial apps has been insufficient, resulting in malicious exploits, network halts, and subpar user experiences. Sei addresses these problems by providing the first layer 1 blockchain specifically optimized for DeFi applications above all else.
“This round is a major step forward for Sei and the rapidly growing DeFi landscape. We’ve partnered with some of the most revered financial institutions in the world to drive forward the same mission: build the best layer 1 for financial applications,” said Jay Jog, Cofounder of Sei Labs.
Most layer 1’s fall into a barbell distribution: two extremes with general purpose chains on one end (e.g., Ethereum, Solana) and app-specific chains on the other (e.g., dYdX, Osmosis). Sei unlocks an entirely new design space between the two — not general-purpose nor app-specific, but DeFi-specific, which enables Sei to create an environment custom-built for DeFi applications. Sei features a built-in order matching engine, frontrunning protection, and the fastest finality of any chain (600 ms) currently in market. The combination of these optimizations make it possible for new types of financial products to emerge — everything ranging from live sports betting to complex options and futures.
“By exploring the new design space in between app-chains and general purpose Layer 1’s, Sei has carefully selected for a unique set of tradeoffs that make its Layer 1 an optimal environment for DeFi applications. They’re unlocking new possibilities with built-in orderbook infrastructure, frontrunning prevention, and major speed improvements. Sei is already seeing a lot of interest from DeFi apps looking to build on top of them,” said Tushar Jain, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital.
“The optimization that Sei has built into its core layer 1 makes it a clear destination for DeFi apps. They have addressed some of the major issues that teams come across on other ecosystems and we’re already starting to see apps move over. We look forward to building together with the Sei community,” said Jason Choi, Co-Founder of Tangent.
One of the killer application types on Sei is orderbook-based exchanges. Any application can leverage Sei’s built-in order matching engine to instantly spin up and customize an orderbook for spot, derivatives, options, sports betting and more. The fastest finality and native frontrunning protection on Sei also makes it compelling for large-scale orderbook exchanges.
“Sei has made advancements in speed, scalability, and security that address some of the major drawbacks of current general purpose chains. We’re confident that they can be a real challenger in the battle for Layer 1,” said Tom Shaughnessy, Co-Founder of Delphi Digital.
The first scalable order matching engine
Orderbooks have historically been one of the hardest apps to build and scale on-chain, so hard that no team has been able to do it successfully. The problem stems from the scalability of the underlying layer 1. Orderbooks demand a certain level of reliability, speed, and throughput that make them unscalable on general purpose layer 1s like Ethereum and Solana.
To solve this, Sei has built an order matching engine into the chain itself that every app built on top can leverage. This allows orderbook-based DeFi apps on Sei to get higher performance than any other chain. Sei has enabled unified order execution which allows for applications to execute orders in a single block vs Serum requires 3 blocks on Solana.
The fastest chain to finality. Period.
By carefully selecting for tradeoffs that give DeFi an unfair advantage, Sei prioritizes reliability, speed and throughput to give DeFi apps the ability to emulate and even beat their centralized counterparts.
Sei is the fastest chain to finality at 600ms; Solana is ~3s, Aptos ~1s and Sui 2–3s. Which enables apps on Sei to have near-instant finality with every transaction, a critically important advantage in DeFi. Sei is able to achieve these speeds all while maintaining upwards of 18K orders per second with optimizations at every layer of the stack: multiple levels of order bundling, market-based parallelization, optimistic block processing and more.
MEV proof
Frontrunning and MEV has continued to plague the best DeFi apps built on Ethereum, Solana and several other major layer 1s. This has become so prevalent that it has become difficult to do anything with real size on-chain today. For DeFi to scale to take a meaningful part of traditional financial markets, this problem is of paramount importance.
Sei is solving this problem by making the layer 1 MEV proof. Starting with frequent batch auctioning, which prevents frontrunning, Sei is rolling out several major chain-level improvements that make the layer 1 uniquely MEV proof, a massive feature that strengthens every app built on top of Sei.
To join the community, please visit Sei on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Medium. To learn more about Sei, please visit https://www.seinetwork.io/
About Sei
Sei is the first Layer 1 blockchain uniquely optimized for DeFi. To offer the best layer 1 for DeFi, Sei has optimized every part of the network to give DeFi apps an unfair advantage. Optimizations include a built-in order matching engine that any app can leverage, the fastest finality of any chain and native frontrunning resistance. For more information, visit seinetwork.io.