Sei Labs, a contributor to the Sei blockchain focused on trading, said today that it has raised $30 million across two strategic funding rounds, according to a press release.

Sei is a top-level, or Layer 1, blockchain designed to facilitate digital asset trading at large scale. It claims to be the fastest blockchain in the industry, competing with the biggest blockchains in the market. It’s designed to support decentralized exchanges, markets and finance applications by providing high-speed transactions, high security and ease of interoperability.

Investors in the rounds included Jump, Distributed Global, Multicoin, Asymmetric, Flow Traders, Hypersphere and Bixin Ventures. The funding brought the company’s valuation to $800 million, the company told TechCrunch.

The Sei blockchain is currently in a testnet phase, which is akin to being in beta so developers can build applications before it’s launched into a mainnet. Sei can support up to 20,000 orders per second, with 500 milliseconds per transaction. Since launching the public testnet on March 13, the company said that it has already processed over 35 million transactions and supports over 3.6 million testnet users.

In comparison, Ethereum, the second largest blockchain by market cap and the ecosystem chosen by developers to build decentralized finance apps for can only process 20 transactions per second and completes most transactions in 2.5 seconds. Solana, which is a much faster blockchain developed to process nonfungible tokens, supports 10,000 transactions per second with an equivalent 2.5-second transaction time.

“Infrastructure and applications historically come in cycles — Ethereum and the last generation of public blockchains led to a Cambrian explosion of new decentralized apps over the past two years,” said Sei Labs co-founder Jayendra Jog. “Among those apps, exchanges and trading have achieved the clearest product-market fit but are held back by outdated Layer 1 blockchains. Our mission at Sei is to build the best infrastructure for trading.”

Blockchains such as Ethereum, although going through upgrades such as the Merge to reduce energy use, suffer from bottlenecks that cause throughput to slow down, generating immense fees for trading on the network. A second layer of blockchains is used to scale up Ethereum, increase speeds and reduce fees. Sei’s vision is to develop its own top-level blockchain that can provide high-speed trading with scaling but without the bottlenecks.

Already over 120 developer teams are deploying projects on Sei ahead of the mainnet launch. These include decentralized community management apps, nonfungible tokens, asset management, decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, gaming and wallets.

“This funding will accelerate our efforts to unlock the next cycle of new applications in Web3, enabling developers to build apps that are orders of magnitude more performant than before,” said Jog.

Image: Sei Labs