Sei Labs, a startup Co-founded by a former Robinhood engineer and ex-VC from Coatue, he launched a brand new open supply challenge that gives a brand new and thrilling strategy to sooner and cheaper Ethereum for builders.
On Wednesday, Sei launched The Parallel Stack, a public profit challenge — which means it is free for all cryptocurrency builders to make use of. It goals to enhance the transaction-per-second (TPS) efficiency of Layer 2 blockchains primarily based on the Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM) by a confirmed idea of parallel processing in pc science, fromcrypto has realized solely.
Sei Labs is an organization already being watched by the crypto neighborhood after it raised $30 million in an $800 million spherical of funding round a 12 months in the past to construct its personal super-fast open supply layer 1 blockchain aimed particularly at cryptocurrency buying and selling.
Now, nonetheless, Sei has turned her consideration to serving to enhance Ethereum, the a lot bigger and extra established blockchain, which in line with CoinMarketCap is the most important when it comes to complete worth — aka the worth of all digital belongings on the community.
By default, EVMs course of transactions sequentially, one by one, which is a sluggish and inefficient methodology that scales poorly.
“The largest limitation of EVMs is the shortage of throughput,” Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, previously of Robinhood, advised fromcrypto. Ethereum’s throughput can not exceed 50 TPS, which limits the expansion of its ecosystem and ends in excessive so-called gasoline charges, charges charged for transactions on Ethereum blockchains. These charges make Ethereum unaffordable for “99.9% of regular customers,” Jog added.
Along with The Parallel Stack, Sei Labs can be engaged on upgrading its blockchain to Sei V2, a parallelized EVM that processes a number of transactions concurrently, making it out there to a “world base of EVM builders,” in line with a November 2023 weblog publish. “We have been engaged on scaling EVMs for a very long time, and we have finished it by parallelization,” Jog mentioned.
Clearly, the upper the transactions per second, the sooner, extra environment friendly and extra scalable the community. Compared, the Bitcoin blockchain averages 5 TPS by default, whereas Ethereum averages 20-30 TPS. Solana’s is round 2,500 TPS and a number of the newer Ethereum targeted layer 2 blockchains like Polygon and Arbitrum can do 65,000 and 40,000 TPS.
Parallel Stack can do round 5,000 TPS, however its purpose is to achieve 10,000 TPS by the tip of the 12 months, Jog mentioned.
After all, Sei is not the one one working to make Ethereum sooner and cheaper. Optimism’s OP Stack, the “EVM equal” of the Layer 2 blockchain, averages 2,000 TPS. However they use completely different design philosophies, and Sei focuses on larger throughput by parallel processing, mentioned Jeff Feng, co-founder of Sei Labs, beforehand an investor in Coatue.
“It is like a range, you possibly can cook dinner two issues on the identical time, versus one meal after which one other,” Feng mentioned. “Traditionally, in case you needed that form of TPS, you needed to construct on Solana and study a complete new growth framework.”
But when Sei is constructing his personal layer 1 blockchain that isn’t derived from Ethereum, why would he attempt to resolve Ethereum’s drawback? As a result of Ethereum is the place most builders are and scaling is an issue they suppose they’ll resolve too. And if Sei can provide them a solution to undertake parallel processing to enhance their work with Ethereum, they may additionally study the essential rules of the Sei ecosystem.
Furthermore, they don’t see the 2 blockchains as opponents. “Our purpose is to scale EVM. There was appreciable curiosity in parallel EVMs and that is the pure subsequent step: democratizing the strategy to make it as plug and play as doable,” mentioned Jog.
So maybe it is smart that Sei is honing in on the EVM house to enchantment to nearly all of blockchain builders.
“It was virtually a no brainer, but it surely clearly unlocks a degree of efficiency and throughput that enables a lot bigger functions to efficiently construct and keep on Ethereum,” Feng mentioned. “With parallelization, it should transfer the business ahead.”
However why would they freely share their work as open supply tasks? The Sei framework is just not the primary to do that, however it’s true to the ethos of many crypto tasks of offering open supply code that anybody can construct with.
“I used to be at Robinhood when the GameStop saga occurred, a small variety of folks have been making choices and we did not know something till the information broke,” Jog mentioned. The shortage of inside transparency made him need to construct a decentralized chain that’s open supply in order that anybody can entry it and isn’t restricted to a gaggle of individuals.
Jog and Feng anticipate preliminary enthusiasm for The Parallel Stack to return from current Ethereum-centric functions which might be operating into bandwidth points and on the lookout for larger TPS alternatives.