Sei Network Emerges as Latest Crypto Favorite; Meme Coin SEIYAN Leads Bets

• The rise in popularity of EVM-compliant blockchains and the parallelization process is driving the growth of the Sei Network's SEI token, which has seen over 75% gains in the past week.
• The Sei Network, launched in August 2023, is a trading-focused blockchain backed by prominent investors and designed for speed, low fees and other features that support trading applications.
• On-chain metrics for the network are heating up, with the growth of ecosystem plays like SEIYAN and SEILOR tokens and an increase in SEI futures open interest indicating mounting interest in the network.

The parallelized EVM narrative is seemingly favoring holders of Sei Network’s SEI tokens, which have yielded gains of more than 75% for buyers over the past week and were the best-performers on the first day of 2024.

EVM, short for Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a virtual computer where all smart contracts and Ethereum applications are deployed. An EVM-compliant blockchain is another network that can run such applications. Parallelization is a relatively new blockchain process that settles multiple transactions at the same time on the network.

Sei Network launched in August as a trading-focused blockchain backed by prominent investors Jump Crypto and Multicoin Capital. It was designed with a focus on speed, low fees and other features tuned to support certain kinds of trading apps.

The network's SEI tokens reached a $400 million capitalization within the first 24 hours after issuance, but gained little in the next few months as on-chain trading behavior remained subdued. However, the recent token trading frenzy in blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche is driving speculators to bet on blockchains other than Ethereum, the usual favorite, and networks such as Sei are benefiting.

Data shows that on-chain metrics are rapidly heating up for Sei Network, favoring bullish bets on ecosystem plays in the short term. Meme coin SEIYAN – apparently a cult term for SEI holders – has gained 400% in the past week, serving as a proxy for the growth of the broader Sei ecosystem.

As of Tuesday, there’s just over $5.5 million locked on Sei-based decentralized applications (dapps), with trading service Astroport holding more than 95% of that, data shows.

Meanwhile, liquid staking protocol Kryptonite’s SEILOR tokens have gained 80% in the past 24 hours as users warm up to more fundamental plays.

SEI futures open interest, or the number of unsettled contracts, increased to $228 million on Tuesday from $69 million at the start of December, suggesting a large jump in trading interest for the tokens.

Hype for Sei

Hype for Sei could be driven by a forthcoming update the developers say will make the network the fastest blockchain in the market while adding other features that let project developers deploy audited smart contracts from EVM-compatible networks and introduce parallelization.

“Sei’s major upgrade is nearly code complete right now. Once audits are complete, this upgrade will be released in a public testnet in Q1 2024, and will get deployed to mainnet sometime in H1 2024,” a recent developer update stated.