Sei Network is rebuilding its blockchain from the ground up to hit 200,000 transactions per second with finality under 400 milliseconds. The project, called Giga, is not one upgrade but three separate ones working together: a new consensus layer, a new execution engine, and a new storage system. Sei Labs published the public roadmap in late May 2026, and parts of it are already live on mainnet.
For readers who know Sei only as a fast, trading-focused Layer 1, Giga marks a jump in ambition. The network’s earlier throughput sat in the 5,000 to 12,500 TPS range. If Giga hits its target, that would be a 40 to 50-fold increase in raw capacity, using a metric Sei calls gigagas to measure computational throughput rather than transaction count alone.
What Is the Giga Upgrade, Exactly?
Giga is a multi-phase engineering program that touches three parts of the blockchain: how validators agree on transactions, how those transactions get executed, and how the resulting data gets stored. Sei Labs describes it as a full rebuild rather than a tuning pass on the existing system. Full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is preserved throughout, so developers building on Sei do not need to rewrite their smart contracts to benefit from the changes.
The three components each have their own name:
- Autobahn handles consensus, the process validators use to agree on the order of transactions.
- Ares rebuilds the execution client, the software that actually runs transactions.
- Eidos rebuilds storage, the database layer that records and serves chain history.
How Does Autobahn Reach 200,000 TPS?
Most blockchains rely on a single block proposer at a time. One validator proposes a block, the network votes, and only then does the next validator get a turn. That sequential process creates a bottleneck no matter how fast the hardware is.
Autobahn is a multi-proposer consensus protocol, meaning several validators can propose blocks at the same time instead of taking turns. Paired with asynchronous execution, which decouples transaction processing from the consensus layer so transactions don’t have to wait for each other in strict sequence, this is the mechanism Sei Labs credits for the leap from thousands of TPS to a target of over 200,000.
Sei has said an internal, geographically distributed devnet has already demonstrated 5 gigagas of throughput and TPS above 200,000 under controlled conditions, though the live mainnet has not yet reached those figures and real-world performance may differ from benchmark results.
What Changed With the Ares and Eidos Rollout?
Sei shipped the first concrete pieces of Giga through its v6.6 mainnet upgrade in August 2026, which brought Ares online as the default execution client and started the phased rollout of Eidos.
Before this update, Sei’s EVM state history shared a database with the rest of the chain’s Cosmos SDK data. That created I/O competition: a query looking up old transaction history could slow down live transaction processing. Eidos separates EVM state into its own dedicated database, a change designed to stop historical queries from crowding out real-time execution.
According to Sei’s engineering blog, the new pruning process built into this phase cut a cleanup pass that used to take 8 to 18 minutes down to roughly five minutes, and it keeps nodes within about 60 blocks of the chain tip instead of drifting hundreds of blocks behind.
The migration is designed to run without taking the network offline. Old and new storage systems operate side by side, data moves across in small batches block by block, and the switch is governed by an on-chain vote and built to be reversible. Sei said shadow nodes replayed real mainnet traffic against the new storage design before it shipped, and block times stayed largely unchanged during testing.
Additional components of Eidos, including a format called FlatKV, a hashing structure called LtHash, and new receipt storage, are scheduled for later stages rather than shipping all at once. Autobahn, the consensus piece, is still in progress and has not yet reached mainnet as a complete system.
How Does This Compare to Other Chains?
Context matters here, since raw TPS numbers are easy to inflate without a reference point:
- Ethereum’s base layer processes roughly 15 to 30 TPS.
- Solana has a theoretical ceiling near 65,000 TPS, though real-world throughput typically runs well below that.
- Sei’s current mainnet, using its existing Twin Turbo optimizations, already achieves sub-400ms block times, close to 30 times faster than Ethereum’s finality.
If Giga’s targets hold up in production, Sei would sit in a throughput tier that few EVM-compatible Layer 1 chains have attempted, though the gap between a controlled devnet benchmark and sustained mainnet performance under real load is the detail worth tracking as the rollout continues through 2026.
Where Does the $SEI Token Stand Right Now?
As of late August 2026, $SEI is trading near $0.046, with a market capitalization of roughly $308 million and a circulating supply of about 6.7 billion of the 10 billion token maximum. The token has posted a 13.5% gain over the trailing seven days but remains approximately 96% below its March 16, 2024 all-time high of $1.14. Because $SEI trades across dozens of exchanges, quoted prices vary slightly by platform and by the minute, so readers should check a live tracker for the exact current figure rather than treating any single snapshot as fixed.
Tokenomics context matters alongside the price. Sei’s Total Value Locked fell sharply from a peak near $626 million in mid-2025 to roughly $41.6 million as of an April 2026 reading, a signal of weak capital retention even as the technical roadmap has advanced. About a third of the 10 billion token supply remains locked under a multi-year vesting schedule, with monthly unlocks reported in the range of 112 to 132 million $SEI as of mid-2026, an ongoing source of sell-side supply that market watchers treat as separate from the engineering progress itself.
What Comes Next?
Sei Labs has not set a fixed completion date for Giga, instead rolling out each component in phases and tracking progress publicly at its milestone tracker. Two of the three subsystems, Ares and Eidos, have partially reached mainnet as of August 2026. Autobahn, the consensus rebuild responsible for the multi-proposer design at the center of the 200,000 TPS target, remains the largest piece still ahead.
- Blog post by Sei Labs: The Eidos Upgrade — replacing Sei’s storage database while the chain is running
- Report by Crypto Briefing: $SEI unveils Giga upgrade roadmap, targets 200,000 TPS and 400ms finality
- Report by OurCryptoTalk: Sei Giga Roadmap targets 200K TPS and sub-400ms finality, including devnet benchmark disclosure
- Report by crypto.news: Sei starts phased Eidos upgrade to prepare network for 200,000 TPS
- Report by KuCoin: Sei Network completes major v6.6 upgrade as Ares and Eidos launches kick off the Giga plan
- Data by CoinMarketCap: Sei ($SEI) Total Value Locked trend and tokenomics overview
- Data by CoinGecko: Live Sei ($SEI) price, market capitalization, and trading volume
