Sei Adds Tokenized Treasuries, Signs AI Partnership, and Publishes Stablecoin Payroll Research in Busy February Week
By Verse Press Research Desk | March 6, 2026 | South Asia and Africa Focus
Sei Network opened February 2026 with a cluster of announcements affecting its DeFi layer and institutional positioning: Ondo Finance's U.S. Dollar Yield token USDY went live on Sei's native lending protocol, NASDAQ-listed AIxCrypto Inc. signed a technology collaboration with the Sei Development Foundation, and Sei published new research on stablecoin-based payroll infrastructure. The developments arrive as the network's total value locked sits at roughly $105 million, well below its mid-2025 peak above $600 million, though daily active users hold near one million and the chain has processed more than five billion transactions in total.
Ondo's USDY Brings Treasury Yield to Sei's Lending Layer
The most immediately consequential move was the activation of Ondo Finance's USDY token on Yei Finance, Sei's native lending protocol. USDY is backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries and bank demand deposits, currently yielding approximately 4.25% annually. It carries a circulating supply above $1.2 billion. Users on Sei can now borrow against USDY on both Yei Finance and Takara Lend, swap it on the Saphyre decentralized exchange, and bridge it to other chains through LayerZero's omnichain infrastructure.
Ondo Finance holds about $2 billion in total locked value across its suite of tokenized products, which also includes tokenized equities and ETFs. The broader market for tokenized U.S. Treasuries has more than doubled, rising from $3.9 billion to $9.2 billion year-over-year, with more than $1 billion in net inflows since January 2026 alone. Total on-chain real-world asset value across all chains stands at $24 billion. Institutional adoption is deepening on Sei directly, with firms including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, and Apollo active in tokenized assets on the network.
Ondo described the product as one that "transforms how capital functions by enabling users to turn idle cash balances into composable real world assets." For readers in Africa and South Asia, USDY represents one of the few accessible routes to dollar-denominated yield without a brokerage account or exposure to local currency volatility. Tokenized Treasury products address a meaningful access gap for retail participants in these regions who have historically been excluded from U.S. financial markets. That said, the product carries real risks: the yield tracks U.S. interest rates, which can fall, and investors rely on Ondo Finance's custodial arrangements holding up in a stress scenario.
AIxCrypto Partners with Sei on AI and Robotics Infrastructure
AIxCrypto Inc. (NASDAQ: AIXC) and the Sei Development Foundation announced a collaboration targeting blockchain infrastructure for Faraday Future's mobility ecosystem and embodied AI applications on February 2. The stated technical scope covers on-chain identity, transaction primitives for IoT devices, DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure) applications, intelligent vehicle systems, and autonomous AI trading.
Jerry Wang, co-CEO of AIxCrypto, stated: "We are committed to aligning with top-tier technology partners. Sei's technical expertise in high-performance blockchain complements our exploration in AI and intelligent assets." Jack Lipstone, business development director at the Sei Development Foundation, pointed to the network's sub-second finality as the relevant capability: "Sei Network was designed to handle high-throughput applications with sub-second finality," he said.
In a separate announcement, AIxCrypto also disclosed a strategic partnership with FF AI-Robotics, a unit of Faraday Future, to explore Web3 infrastructure for embodied AI. Readers should note that Faraday Future (NASDAQ: FFIE) has a long record of missed production timelines and financial difficulties. Neither announcement specifies near-term deliverables, so the practical impact of these partnerships remains unclear. The DePIN dimension is worth watching in South and Southeast Asia, where IoT adoption is expanding in manufacturing and logistics, but on-chain implementation details are still absent.
Stablecoin Payroll Research Frames a Concrete Regional Problem
Sei also published market research this week examining stablecoin-based payroll as infrastructure rather than a niche product. The report centers on a straightforward problem: traditional wire transfers cost more than $50 per transaction and take three to five business days to settle.
This is not an abstract concern in South Asia or Africa. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka rank among the world's largest remittance recipients, and the fee-and-delay problem is felt acutely by diaspora workers sending wages home. In Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoin adoption already leads the world at a 9.3% rate, driven by demand for dollar savings and cross-border payments. The region processed $54 billion in stablecoin transactions in the year to mid-2025. Payment infrastructure is already operating at scale: NALA's Rafiki platform enables stablecoin payments across Africa with instant, 24/7 settlement, offering a concrete example of how these rails are becoming embedded in daily financial life. Fintech analyst Efayomi Carr, writing for TechCabal, argued that stablecoins "will increasingly function as primary financial accounts in emerging markets" in 2026, covering payroll, savings, and everyday balances outside traditional banks.
In the same period, Deel partnered with MoonPay to enable stablecoin salary payouts for global workers, and a separate consortium of Aleo, Toku, and Paxos Labs launched what they described as the first private stablecoin payroll solution, addressing the salary-transparency problem on public blockchains.
Prediction Markets and Network Metrics
On the application layer, PredPred launched a prediction market platform on Sei mainnet using a bonding curve pricing model, offering infinite-liquidity YES/NO markets where YES and NO positions are represented as tradeable NFTs. The mechanism is structurally similar to the one used by Friend.tech, which attracted significant speculative volume before collapsing in 2023 and 2024. This is a high-risk instrument and should be approached with caution by retail participants.
On network fundamentals, Sei reports 400-millisecond time-to-finality, a theoretical 12,500 transactions per second, and 96.9 million total wallets. First-month user retention hit a record 39% in January 2026 after the platform added 4.4 million new users in December 2025. The SEI token trades near $0.07 with a market cap around $495 million.
What Comes Next
The most structurally significant event on Sei's near-term roadmap is the SIP-3 "Giga" upgrade, expected to complete by the end of Q1 2026. The upgrade will transition the network to an EVM-only architecture, consolidating to a single execution standard for higher throughput. How that transition affects developer activity, TVL, and token liquidity will be the clearest test of whether Sei's user growth translates into sustained capital and builder interest.