Sei Labs, a startup co-founded by a former Robinhood engineer and a former Coatue VC, has launched a new open source project that offers a fresh and exciting approach to making Ethereum faster and cheaper for developers.
On Wednesday, Say launched Parallel Stack, a public good project that means it will be free for crypto developers to use. Aims to improve transaction per second (TPS) performance of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based layer 2 blockchains through proven computer science parallelism concepts, learned exclusively by TechCrunch There is.
Sei Labs raised $30 million at a valuation of $800 million about a year ago to build an ultra-fast, open-source layer-1 blockchain focused on crypto transactions. This is a company that is already attracting attention from the cryptocurrency community.
But now, Sei is focused on improving Ethereum. Ethereum is a much larger and more established blockchain, with the largest total locked value (the value of all digital assets on the network), according to CoinMarketCap.
By default, EVM processes transactions sequentially, one after the other, which is a slow and inefficient method that does not scale well.
“The biggest limitation of EVM is the lack of throughput,” Sei Labs co-founder Jay Jog, formerly of Robinhood, told TechCrunch. Ethereum's throughput cannot exceed 50 TPS, which limits the growth of the ecosystem and increases the so-called gas fees charged for transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. These fees make Ethereum unaffordable for “99.9% of regular users,” Jog added.
According to a blog from November 2023, apart from The Parallel Stack, sei Labs is also working on upgrading its blockchain to sei V2, a parallelized EVM that can process multiple transactions simultaneously and It will be accessible to a global base of EVM developers. post. “We've been working on scaling and parallelizing EVM for a long time,” he says.
Obviously, the more transactions per second, the faster, more efficient, and more scalable the network becomes. For reference, Bitcoin's blockchain averages 5 TPS by default, while Ethereum's average is 20-30 TPS. Solana’s blockchain is around 2,500 TPS, and some of the new Ethereum-centric layer 2 blockchains like Polygon and Arbitrum can run 65,000 and 40,000 TPS.
Parallel Stack can run about 5,000 TPS, but Jog said they aim to reach 10,000 TPS by the end of the year.
Of course, Sei isn't the only one working to make Ethereum faster and cheaper. His OP stack for Optimism, a Layer 2 blockchain “equivalent to EVM,” runs an average of 2,000 TPS. However, the two use different design philosophies, and sei Labs' focus is on increasing throughput through parallel processing, said Jeff Feng, co-founder of sei Labs, who previously invested in Coatue. says.
“It's like a stove, and instead of cooking one dish and then another, you can make two dishes at the same time,” Fenn said. “Until now, if you wanted this kind of TPS, you had to learn a completely new development framework based on Solana.”
But if Sei is building its own layer 1 blockchain that isn't derived from Ethereum, why would it work on solving Ethereum's problems? Because Ethereum is where most developers are, and it's scaling Because it's a problem they think they can deal with too. And if Sei can provide them with ways to embrace parallelism to improve their work on Ethereum, they could also learn the core tenets of Sei's ecosystem in the process.
Furthermore, they do not consider the two blockchains to be competitors. “Our goal is to scale EVM. There is a lot of interest in parallel EVM, and democratizing access and making it as plug-and-play as possible is a natural next step,” Jog said. said.
Therefore, it probably makes sense that Say is focusing on the EVM space to reach the majority of blockchain developers.
“This was almost a no-brainer, but it clearly unlocks a level of performance and throughput that allows larger applications to be successfully built and remain on Ethereum,” Feng said. Masu. “Parallelization moves the industry forward.”
But why would they freely share their work as an open source project? Sei's framework isn't the first to do this, but it does a great job of providing open code that anyone can build on. True to the spirit of the crypto project.
“I was at Robinhood when the GameStop scandal happened. A small group of people were making decisions and we didn't know anything until the news came out,” Jog said. Due to the lack of internal transparency, he wanted to build an open source decentralized chain that would not be limited to a specific group but would be accessible to everyone.
Jog and Feng expect initial excitement for parallel stacks to come from existing Ethereum-focused applications facing bandwidth issues and looking for higher TPS options.