With the ever-growing blockchain galaxy gaining yet another star, Sei, a newly minted trading-focused blockchain network sprouted to life last Tuesday. This project, nurtured by Jump Crypto and Multicoin Capital, has generated an impressive first-day market capitalization of over $400 million.
Just in the initial 24 hours, the trading volume for their SEI token hit a sky-high of $1.6 billion. Echoing this grand debut, big names in the crypto trading scene such as Coinbase, Binance and Kraken have followed suit and listed SEI.
However, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. One controversy brewing at the dawn of this new venture revolves around the anticipated airdrop, a popular method employed by blockchain entities to attract users and incentivize liquidity by rewarding early adopters and network testers. Despite assurances by Sei Labs, the primary contributor behind Sei, that the airdrop rewards would follow an initial warm-up period, many complained about delays and confusion surrounding the exact eligibility criteria for the airdrop. Furthermore, Sei’s official Discord server, a key hub for community member interactions, hit a roadblock as it went offline. Sei’s seeming disquietude is evident, users quenching for more transparency.
Sei isn’t an ordinary blockchain; its development uses the Cosmos SDK, aiming to create blockchains compactable with other networks in the Cosmos ecosystem. Born as an application-specific network, it intends to challenge the norm set by other general-purpose blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It touts speed, low fees, and other features specifically tuned for trading applications as its core strength.
The brains behind Sei, co-founders Jeff Feng and Jay Jog are setting their focus on supporting social platforms, gaming, and carbon credits. Jog elaborated on this in an interview, underscoring how trading applications at present fail to scale on-chain. He proposed a fundamental rewrite of the underlying infrastructure as the possible antidote to this conundrum, marking a significant divergence from iterating on exchange-mechanism design.
Amid the clouds of skepticism about the hiccups with the airdrop and eligibility issues, some facts stand tall like beacon lights: 40% of the circulating supply for SEI has been earmarked for its team and private investors, 48% goes to initiatives like the airdrop and other ecosystem reserves, while the remainder is set aside for the SEI Foundation and Binance launchpool incentives. Transparency, or the lack thereof, will likely be the decisive factor in whether this new blockchain star will shine or flicker away.
Source: Coindesk
