Sei Network’s Giga upgrade, unveiled in May 2025, represents a watershed moment in blockchain performance by introducing Autobahn, the world’s first multi-proposer consensus protocol for an EVM-compatible Layer 1. Whereas traditional chains rely on a single validator to assemble and broadcast each block, Autobahn empowers multiple validators to propose blocks in parallel. This innovation shatters the long-standing throughput ceiling, delivering over 200,000 on-chain transactions per second in live devnet tests and achieving finality in under 700 milliseconds, with internal experiments clocking 250,000 transactions per second and finality under 400 milliseconds. By comparison, conventional EVM chains average around 4,000 transactions per second and require roughly six seconds to finalize a block, meaning Sei now offers more than 50 times higher throughput, 70 times faster block production, and 40 times greater execution efficiency.
At the heart of Autobahn’s speed gains is a sophisticated redesign of the consensus pipeline. Validators certify lightweight proofs of data availability rather than downloading full blocks, decoupling data availability from consensus and eliminating network-transfer delays. Parallel proposal lanes feed into “tip cut” proposals that batch certified tips from all lanes into a single commit, reducing consensus to only a few round trips. Meanwhile, transaction execution and state fetching occur in asynchronous pipelines off the critical path, so nodes can validate and process blocks concurrently. Complementing these breakthroughs, Sei ships a purpose-built EVM client instead of forking existing implementations, optimizing state management, storage layers, and execution schedules to maintain stability even under extreme load.
These architectural upgrades have sparked a dramatic surge in real-world usage. By December 2024, weekly active addresses on Sei had climbed past 1.2 million, a 780 percent jump in just one month, while daily active addresses reached 377,000, up 41 percent week over week. Gaming has proved especially popular: daily gaming wallets now number 311,900 and gaming-related transactions average 354,000 per day. Titles like World of Dypians alone process over 61,000 transactions every day, a 151.5 percent increase quarter over quarter. Taken together, these figures suggest that Sei is facilitating billions of dollars in on-chain value each week across decentralized finance, real-time trading and interactive gaming.
Perhaps most remarkable, all of these performance and adoption gains come without sacrificing decentralization or developer convenience. Sei remains fully compatible with Solidity and Vyper smart contracts, allowing teams to port existing Ethereum applications seamlessly and continue using familiar tooling, libraries and wallets. By marrying Web 2-level speeds and sub-second finality with Ethereum’s rich developer ecosystem, the Giga upgrade not only breaks through longstanding scalability barriers but also sets the stage for censorship-resistant, real-time blockchain services that could power the next wave of mainstream Web 3 adoption.
