Sei Network recorded 1.7 million daily active addresses in the week of February 16, 2026, surpassing a previous record of 1.5 million set in January and extending what the project describes as six consecutive quarters of network growth. The milestone arrived alongside Kraken's announcement of direct Sei EVM connectivity, removing a bridging step that previously added cost and delay for users moving funds onto the chain.

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Kraken Integration Closes a Practical Gap

Kraken's activation of native Sei EVM deposits and withdrawals is significant for a specific operational reason. Sei is in the process of retiring its Cosmos-based infrastructure in favor of a fully EVM-compatible architecture, a transition governed by the SIP-3 protocol update currently targeting mid-2026. That migration shifts all addresses from the Cosmos bech32 format to the standard Ethereum 0x format. Kraken enabling 0x-format support ahead of the full switchover gives users a cleaner path onto the network without needing to interact with third-party bridges. Coinbase has separately confirmed it will support the EVM-only migration, though it plans to temporarily suspend SEI deposits and withdrawals during the transition window; no specific dates for that suspension have been confirmed in available sources.

"New network added: Sei EVM is now live on Kraken," the exchange announced, as cited in Sei's weekly roundup.

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Takara Lend Marks One Year, AI Builder Count Tops 100

Sei's primary native lending protocol, Takara Lend, marked its first anniversary on mainnet during the same week. The protocol reported approximately 40x growth since launch. At its Q3 2025 peak, Takara held roughly $105.8 million in total value locked (TVL), a 48.4% quarter-over-quarter increase at the time, with stablecoin yields reaching as high as 15% annually. As of its most recent reported figures, Takara is the largest DeFi market on the network by TVL according to DefiLlama data.

Separately, research from Onchain Lu identified more than 100 teams building AI-driven agent applications on Sei.

The report cited the chain's low-latency design as a key factor. Sei processes transactions in parallel rather than sequentially, handling non-conflicting operations simultaneously at a block finality time of around 390 milliseconds. That speed characteristic is increasingly relevant for AI agents, which need to execute many small transactions quickly and without waiting for manual approval.

Also announced during the week: Cultz Trade, a gamified social perpetuals trading platform built on Monaco (a Sei ecosystem project), revealed plans for an upcoming launch. The platform combines social mechanics with on-chain derivatives trading.

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ETHDenver: Agentic Commerce and the x402 Protocol

Sei Labs was present at ETHDenver in February, where Paul Gebheim delivered a talk titled "Power, Control, and Trust in the Age of Agentic Blockchain." Sei Labs representatives also participated in sessions focused on the x402 payment protocol and stablecoin infrastructure.

The x402 protocol, developed by Coinbase, routes stablecoin micropayments natively through HTTP by activating the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. Stripe adopted it for USDC payments in February 2026. Stripe co-founder and President John Collison described the adoption as enabling "a torrent of agentic commerce," according to research published by DWF Labs.

For AI agents that need to pay for services or data in real time without human confirmation loops, the protocol offers a standardized way to settle transactions in stablecoins at the application layer.

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Token Price Diverges from On-Chain Activity

SEI is currently trading near $0.071 as of early March 2026, with a 24-hour volume around $60 million. The token's market capitalization sits at approximately $497 million against a circulating supply of roughly 6.73 billion tokens. SEI reached an all-time high of $1.14 and is currently trading around 94% below that figure, placing it near its all-time low.

The gap between record user activity and a depressed token price is an unusual combination. On-chain usage metrics and token valuations can correlate, but that relationship has not held on Sei in the near term.

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Regional Relevance: South Asia, Africa, and the Remittance Case

Several of this week's developments carry direct relevance for users in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Kraken operates across multiple emerging-market jurisdictions, and the removal of bridging requirements reduces both fees and transaction time for users in regions where every basis point of cost matters more. Sei also has a pre-existing distribution play in these markets: since late 2025, its crypto wallet has come pre-installed on Xiaomi smartphones sold outside mainland China and the U.S., with priority rollout in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and Latin America.

The 100-plus agentic applications building on Sei are also worth tracking from a remittance perspective.

Stablecoin-settled, AI-executed micropayments on a low-latency chain present a structurally cheaper alternative to conventional remittance corridors, which often involve SWIFT-dependent bank transfers with multi-day settlement or hawala networks that carry their own cost structures and operational friction.

That framing is relevant for economies where remittances are a primary income source for many households.

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What Comes Next

The SIP-3 upgrade and the subsequent Sei Giga release represent the network's largest technical milestone ahead. Sei Giga targets 200,000 transactions per second and 5 Gigagas throughput, which the team describes as roughly 50 times faster than current execution speeds. The EVM-only architecture that SIP-3 enables is designed to attract Ethereum developers without requiring them to rewrite existing contract code. How the network performs through that migration, and whether exchange support keeps pace, will be the primary story to watch through mid-2026.