The high-throughput blockchain Sei has upgraded its devnet, a developer-focused kind of testnet, to v2. With the new version, apps developed on Ethereum can be deployed on Sei with no changes.
Sei is hoping to lure developers with an execution environment it says offers the “best of Ethereum and Solana.”
Sei’s Ethereum-Solana hybrid analogy is based on its use of parallelized processing. In brief, parallelized blockchains process multiple transactions simultaneously rather than one at a time. Solana’s version of smart contracts make use of parallel processing. Ethereum smart contracts do not.
Sei is one among multiple studios courting developers with the promise of a parallelized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — and perhaps a more scalable version of Ethereum’s execution environment.
Sei went live alongside an airdrop of its token in August. Sei Labs, the team developing the blockchain, told Blockworks in January that its next version would involve a move to the EVM. Before the upgrade, Sei ran on the Cosmos ecosystem’s CosmWasm smart contract platform, meaning Ethereum apps couldn’t run on Sei.
At the time, Blockworks noted that other outfits, including Neon and Monad, were working on parallelized EVMs as well.
Read more: Parallelized EVMs are gaining popularity, but they won’t scale blockchains alone
Sei is now backwards compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, meaning developers can deploy onto the newer chain without changing their code.
“While for some developers the current offering of EVM blockchains and rollups is sufficient, the majority face bottlenecks as they attempt to scale their application,” Sei Labs co-founder Jay Jog said in a press release.
In a blog post accompanying the upgrade, Sei said its parallelized EVM would be able to handle thousands of transactions per second (TPS).
For context, Ethereum has handled 62 TPS at its best, while the popular Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum hit a peak of 380 TPS, according to a dashboard compiled by Chainspect. Solana’s highest TPS was roughly 1,600 TPS.
The public devnet is aimed at developers building with Sei — and functions like a testnet from a user’s perspective. Sei hopes to go to mainnet sometime in the first half of 2024, a spokesperson for the team said.
Sei has tacked on over 200,000 new users in the past month, according to a Flipside dashboard. Of these new users, a large majority appear to be trading NFTs.
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