Welcome to the Sei Overview. In this edition, we take a look at Monaco, explore its private alpha performance to date, and delve into a report on the new consensus mechanism published by Sei Labs.
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By the Numbers
$SEI token price: $0.05 (-9.8%)
Market cap: $333.7M (-9.35%)
Total Value Locked (TVL): $50.3M (-5.5%)
Stablecoin market cap: $322.7M (+0.6%)
Daily EVM transactions: 21.4K (-16.7%)
Daily EVM active addresses: 5.2K (+30%)
Block time: 0.43s (+4.9%)
Percentages and metrics are calculated over a 7-day time frame, unless noted otherwise.
Sei Showcase
💨 What’s happening: Monaco Protoco is a trading network for spot and perpetual markets that is currently in private alpha (testnet). To date, it has processed roughly $600 million in trading volume across about 27,000 signups, according to data shared with Token Relations.
💨 Why it matters: Monaco is led by CEO Simran Singh, who previously led the DeFi trading desk at GSR and traded oil derivatives at Goldman Sachs, while the broader team includes traders from Hudson River Trading, Jump Crypto, Robinhood, and P72. That background is relevant because Monaco's design choices center on execution speed and capital efficiency with trader insight.
Most onchain exchanges run their order matching fully onchain, which ties their speed to how fast the underlying blockchain confirms transactions. Monaco instead employs a hybrid design that handles order matching off-chain and settles trades onchain on Sei.
Based on data shared with Token Relations, this setup looks to execute trades up to 20 times faster than most decentralized exchanges, with trade confirmation latency targeting under one millisecond.
Monaco is structured around a few features uncommon on most exchanges:
Any trader can earn rebates for placing limit orders, in which you set a price and wait for it to be filled.
A referral system called TraderCodes shares up to 50% of the trading fees paid by referred traders with users who invited them.
Traders will be able to access a level of capital efficiency that is typically reserved for HNW / institutional clients by allowing traders to access portfolio margin in order to post less collateral when offsetting perp positions.
Alongside standard trading and smart contracts, Monaco plans to list markets tied to underlying mechanics such as electricity, inflation, or custom indices. Support for strategies wherein traders hold offsetting positions to earn yield on stocks is also in the works.
💨 The bigger picture: Monaco's most significant traction so far has been on testnet. So the question is how much of that volume and signup activity will carry over to the public launch, where there is more capital and liquidity, and counterparty risk functions differently than in a test environment.
Features like maker rebates for all users and high referral fee-sharing also must prove they work a lasting business model if Monaco wants to emerge as a prominent trading venue.
Accelerating Sei’s blockchain
Updates on the latest games, validators, builders and more that are helping Sei expand
The Sei Research Initiative published a report that dives deeper into Sedna, a component of the network’s Giga upgrade. Most blockchains encrypt their mempool, but Sedna is being built to not encrypt anything at all. It's important to note that this solution isn’t perfect as it still leaks some partial information and exposes basic transaction metadata, but in exchange removes the single decryption committee that every other design has to protect.
Sei also explored Ambulance, the successor to Autobahn and a development for BFT consensus. In layman terms, current blockchain consensus systems have a hard time knowing when the leader is actually failing versus just being slow. Ambulance replaces waiting for timers with having participants race to solve the problem.
Sei’s daily stablecoin transaction volume hit $267.8M on June 23, the second highest this year.
Monaco’s CEO Simran Singh spoke about RWA perpetual futures, why onchain infrastructure can improve capital efficiency, and how trust plays a factor in the progression of onchain markets.
Deposits for Feather’s PYUSD0 vault on Sei hit an all-time high of $16.3M on June 26. This growth was an extension from Yuzu Money’s expansion of its syzUSD stablecoin to Sei, and launch of a syzUSD/PYUSD lending market.
Lock in to the ecosystem
Want to get involved?
Check out the latest job postings for Sei Labs and Sei Development Foundation
Explore Sei’s ecosystem to find regional partners and learn how to build on its EVM layer
That’s all for this week.
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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.