Alright, let’s talk about what’s been happening over on the Sei network, based on the latest report from the good people at Messari. They dug into the numbers for the first quarter of 2025, and there’s quite a bit to unpack.
- Sei’s network experienced significant growth in Q1 2025, driven largely by gaming activity, with average daily game transactions making up more than half of all transactions. Despite this growth, the price of the SEI token itself decreased substantially during the quarter.
- The Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Sei network increased significantly in dollar terms, reaching $363 million, and the amount of stablecoins held on the network also hit a new high. DeFi also saw increased diversity with new borrowing and lending protocols emerging.
- Sei is actively working to attract more builders and creators to its network through various incentive programs and technical integrations. They are also exploring ventures into decentralized science, including a potential acquisition of 23andMe.
First off, the tech side saw some interesting action. Sei Labs hit a speed of 5.4 gigagas per second in a test environment. Now, what does that even mean? Think of it like how much data the network can handle really, really fast. They figure that’s about 115,000 transactions per second (TPS). And things got settled, or finalized, in about 700 milliseconds (ms). That’s pretty quick, isn’t it?
This speed push is all part of something they call the Giga upgrade. The idea is to make the network way, way faster, like 50 times faster than other networks that can run similar kinds of applications. They’re aiming for a maximum of five gigagas per second eventually, which they estimate could be around 250,000 TPS. That’s a lot of digital hustle.
On the money side of things, the total value locked, or TVL (that’s the total amount of crypto sitting in the network’s applications), went up nicely. In US dollar terms, it jumped 73.7% from about $209 million to $363 million. The amount of stablecoins (crypto designed to stay at a steady price, usually pegged to the dollar) on Sei also hit a new high at $178 million. People seem to like keeping their stable money here.
But here’s a funny thing, or maybe not so funny depending on if you hold the token. The price of SEI itself actually went down quite a bit in the quarter, dropping 56.5% to $0.17. Yet, because the price fell, the TVL measured in SEI tokens went way up, like 299%, hitting 2.11 billion SEI. It’s a bit like your house value dropping, but you suddenly own three times as many bricks. Weird, right?
So, what was driving all this activity? Turns out, it was mostly games. Gaming became the biggest thing happening on the network, pulling ahead of other stuff like trading or collecting digital art (NFTs). Average daily transactions just from games shot up 79.8% to 354,000. That’s more than half of all the transactions happening each day.
This gaming boom really helped pump up the overall network usage. The number of average daily active addresses (DAAs) – basically, how many unique wallets were doing things each day – increased 78.1% to 311,900. And the total average daily transactions across the whole network went up 59% to 639,800.
They even have a “Gaming Diversity score,” which for Sei was 8 in Q1. This suggests there’s a good mix of different games popping up. Some big ones driving the numbers were World of Dypians, which is a multiplayer role-playing game you can even find on Epic Games. It saw a huge jump in transactions, averaging over 61,000 per day.
Another game doing well was Archer Hunter, a mobile game. It averaged over 45,000 transactions daily. There are a bunch of other games too, like Europe Fantasy League, Hot Spring, FishWar, and more. It seems like if you wanted to play games on a blockchain, Sei was a popular spot.
Now, let’s look at the DeFi (decentralized finance) side again. Even with the SEI price dip, the TVL in dollars grew. This suggests new money was coming in or existing users were putting more value into the applications. Sei’s DeFi Diversity score also improved, going from 4 to 6. More types of financial applications are showing up, which is a good sign.
When it comes to borrowing and lending, one protocol called Yei Finance has been the big player. It kept growing, ending the quarter with over $192 million in TVL, which was more than half of all the TVL on Sei. They were running programs to give out points and tokens, which probably helped keep people interested.
Interestingly, some new borrowing and lending protocols showed up too. Takara Lend launched and quickly got $15 million in TVL. Avalon Finance, which focuses on Bitcoin borrowing and lending, also appeared and grabbed $29.3 million in TVL. So, the lending scene got a bit more crowded.
Trading on the decentralized exchanges (DEXs) was a bit different. The average daily trading volume in dollars actually went down by 18% to $16.1 million. But there was a big shake-up in who was doing the most trading.
A new DEX called Sailor launched in January and pretty much took over. It averaged $7.8 million in daily volume, pushing the older players aside. DragonSwap, which used to be a big deal, saw its daily volume drop significantly to $7 million, and its TVL also fell. Jellyverse, another DEX, also saw its volume and TVL decrease.
Looking ahead, Sei is really focusing on getting more people to build things on the network. Their plan for 2025 is all about builders, creators, and people contributing. They’ve been running different programs to give out SEI tokens as incentives, like the Creator Fund for people making digital art or social content, and the Builders Fund to reward developers who build applications.
They also started something called the Sei More Campaign in March, which is basically paying people to create content about Sei on social media. It’s a way to get the word out and keep the community buzzing. They even have a Sei Street Team initiative to support creators who go to real-life events.
There were quite a few technical hookups in the quarter too. LayerZero, which helps different blockchains talk to each other, added support for SEI tokens. Alchemy, a company that provides tools for developers, integrated with Sei, making it easier for people to build applications. Chainlink’s CCIP, another tool for cross-chain communication, also went live.
They even integrated with something called elizaOS, which lets AI agents run on the network. And Turnkey integrated, which helps developers add digital wallets more easily into their apps. It seems like they’re trying to make it as simple as possible for people to build and use stuff on Sei.
A rather unexpected announcement in March was that Sei was looking into potentially buying 23andMe, that company that does genetic testing. And they hired someone specifically to head up their focus on decentralized science (DeSci). It’s a bit of a curveball, isn’t it? Putting genetic data on a blockchain? We’ll have to see where that goes.
Back to the SEI token itself. Besides the price drop, the network’s revenue in US dollars also fell quite a bit, down 78.6% to $22,500. Revenue measured in SEI tokens also decreased, but not as much. The total number of SEI tokens floating around (circulating supply) went up by 16% because some tokens that were locked up became available, and also from staking rewards.
Even though the circulating supply increased, the market value of all the SEI tokens (circulating market cap) dropped by less than the price, down 49.5% to $0.84 billion. This is just because there were more tokens out there, even if each one was worth less.
Inflation, which is how fast new SEI tokens are being created, slowed down a little, from 6.4% to 5.5% per year. People were staking (locking up their tokens to help secure the network and earn rewards) about the same amount of SEI. So, the yearly reward rate for staking stayed flat at 5.1%.
When you factor in inflation, the real return from staking was actually negative 0.4% at the end of the quarter. It means the rewards you got weren’t quite keeping up with the rate at which new tokens were being added to the supply.
Looking at network usage more closely, the number of wallets coming back each day went up a lot, 137.4%, while the number of brand new wallets only rose a little, 4.1%. This suggests that the growth in active users was mostly from people who were already using the network coming back more often, rather than a huge wave of completely new users.
Sei has a unique thing where a native price oracle (something that feeds price data to the network) creates a bunch of transactions automatically. Because of this, the total number of transactions looks really high, around 4 million a day. But the transactions from actual people using applications only made up about 13.5% of that total in Q1. That percentage, though, was up 54.1% from the previous quarter, meaning real user activity was growing relative to the automated stuff.
On the staking front, the total amount of SEI tokens staked stayed pretty much the same. But because the price dropped, the value of all that staked SEI in US dollars went down significantly, 56.6% to $0.91 billion.
Liquid staking, where you stake your tokens but get another token you can use in other applications, continued to grow. The amount of SEI being liquid staked increased by 23.1%. Compared to the total amount staked, the percentage of SEI being liquid staked went up for the fifth quarter in a row, reaching 3.86%.
Silo is the main protocol for liquid staking on Sei, and its TVL in SEI tokens also increased. Silo’s parent company, Mevvy, even raised a good chunk of money in January. Silo also released a tool in November that helps people build bots to find profitable trading opportunities (what’s sometimes called MEV).
Back to the technical side, besides the Giga upgrade goals, they did see a slight increase in the time it takes to create a new block on the network, from 438ms to 491ms. That’s a 12.2% increase, not a huge deal, but worth noting. They also had some issues with transactions failing in December and January, but that seems to have smoothed out since then.
They also passed an update related to how transaction fees work, based on something called EIP-1559, which is used on Ethereum. And Sei Labs and the Sei Foundation started a research initiative, publishing several reports during the quarter.
