The Layer 1 blockchain, built for high-frequency financial applications, recorded a peak of 951,700 daily active EVM addresses in the same week, an all-time high. Year-over-year growth in daily active users reached 214%, according to data from TokenRelations. The network now supports more than 90 million wallets. The SEI token was trading at approximately $0.104 to $0.105 as of the week ending January 26, 2026, with a market capitalization near $693 million.

Bhutan's State Fund Joins as Validator

The most geopolitically significant development of the week was the announcement that Druk Holding and Investments (DHI), Bhutan's sovereign wealth fund, plans to deploy a Sei validator node in Q1 2026. The deployment will be managed through DHI's InnoTech division. Phuntsho Namgay, DHI's head of innovation and technology, said the partnership would "create new pathways for data valuation, scientific advancement, payments systems, and asset tokenization." DHI officials framed the move as part of Bhutan's "long-term vision of technological self-reliance."

Bhutan is one of the more active nation-states in blockchain infrastructure globally. The kingdom holds roughly 11,286 BTC, worth approximately $1 billion at current valuations, accumulated through state-run mining operations, and is developing a special administrative region called Gelephu Mindfulness City with dedicated digital finance infrastructure.

For South Asia broadly, where governments from India to Sri Lanka are exploring tokenization and central bank digital currencies but moving cautiously on decentralized infrastructure, Bhutan's decision to directly operate validator nodes signals that smaller states in the region may act ahead of their larger neighbors. DHI's stated interest in asset tokenization and payments is also directly relevant to Bhutan's trade corridors with India and Bangladesh, adding a practical commercial dimension to the validator deployment.

Chainlink Brings Stock Market Pricing On-Chain

On January 20, Chainlink launched 24/5 U.S. Equities Data Streams, delivering sub-second, cryptographically signed pricing data across more than 40 blockchains. The feeds cover pre-market, regular, after-hours, and overnight trading sessions, and include bid/ask spreads, mid-prices, last-traded prices, and market status signals.

Chainlink's infrastructure has secured more than $27 trillion in transaction value to date.

Monaco, a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) trading platform built on Sei, announced it would be among the first venues on the network to integrate the new feeds. The Monaco CEO (whose name was not available in public statements at the time of publication) said integrating Chainlink's data streams would "provide the highly-performant pricing needed to maintain market quality, protect traders, and empower institutional trading on Monaco."

Monaco is designed as a shared liquidity layer for applications across crypto, real-world assets, prediction markets, and gaming, with sub-millisecond execution and 400ms settlement.

For developers in South Asia and Africa, the Chainlink equities integration has practical relevance. According to regulatory observers, India's securities regulator SEBI has been examining frameworks for tokenized securities. Platforms built on Sei using these feeds could serve as reference architecture for retail-accessible, high-frequency tokenized equity products in markets where access to U.S. equities is otherwise restricted or expensive. The tokenized real-world asset market has surpassed $30 billion globally, with tokenized treasury products alone exceeding $9 billion, illustrating the scale of opportunity these integrations could address.

Prediction Markets and Institutional Custody

Blits Trade launched its Tap Trading product on Sei mainnet during the same week, offering prediction market positions with payouts of up to 33x.

The format is relevant to emerging markets where traditional financial hedging instruments are largely inaccessible to retail users. Sei's near-zero transaction fees and sub-400ms finality make it technically viable for small-stake prediction markets on commodity prices such as cocoa, coffee, and oil, as well as currency movements or political events in markets like Nigeria and Kenya, though regulatory clarity in those jurisdictions remains limited.

Ledger Enterprise added native Sei support for institutional custody, and Kraken became one of the first U.S. exchanges to enable native Sei EVM deposits and withdrawals.

For institutional players in Sub-Saharan Africa, where regulated custody infrastructure is still developing, Ledger Enterprise-grade support removes a meaningful operational barrier. A growing number of exchanges and custodians in the region have begun building regulated digital asset offerings, and institutional-grade custody tools lower the operational barriers those providers face.

Stablecoin Research and a Sharding Paper

Sei Labs published a policy paper arguing that the global spread of USD-pegged stablecoins effectively turns the U.S. Federal Reserve into a de facto global retail bank.

The paper is timely: dollar-pegged stablecoins now account for roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Africa, and the stablecoin market broadly surpassed $230 billion. Annual stablecoin transaction volume exceeded $4 trillion in the period from January to July 2025, representing an 83% year-over-year increase. Standard Chartered analysts have separately projected that stablecoins could draw $1 trillion in deposits out of emerging-market banks over three years, a finding that underscores the policy stakes for dollarization-exposed economies.

Ben Marsh of Sei Labs summarized the paper's core argument. Marsh's paper argues, in effect, that in a world of frictionless dollar rails, adopting stablecoins is functionally equivalent to using the Federal Reserve's balance sheet as one's own.

For policymakers in Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria, all of which face significant dollarization pressure, the paper's framework for thinking about monetary sovereignty and stablecoin adoption carries direct relevance. Standard Chartered's projection of $1 trillion in emerging-market deposit outflows tied to stablecoin adoption gives that concern concrete scale. The paper also advances what the authors describe as an "impossible quartet" argument, weighing monetary independence, fixed exchange rates, capital mobility, and banking stability against one another, offering policymakers a framework for navigating stablecoin adoption without sacrificing macroeconomic control.

Separately, Sei Labs and Mysten Labs co-authored a research paper called Sedna, releasing it as a preprint on arXiv (arXiv:2512.17045). Sedna proposes a new sharding protocol for multi-proposer blockchains, representing a technical departure from the policy focus of the stablecoin paper. The paper's claims remain theoretical and are pending any mainnet implementation.

The design aims, according to the researchers, to resolve the longstanding tension between low transaction latency and censorship resistance, using coded data bundles delivered to subsets of proposers.

The paper describes the approach as requiring no changes to existing consensus mechanisms, which the authors argue would allow incremental adoption.

What Comes Next

Sei's next major infrastructure milestone is the Giga upgrade, also known as SIP-3, targeted for Q1 2026. The upgrade is expected to increase network throughput to 200,000 transactions per second, a 10 to 40 times increase over current capacity, while preserving sub-400ms finality.

Q4 2025 marked Sei's sixth consecutive quarter of user growth; daily active addresses rose 26% quarter-over-quarter and daily transactions climbed 17% to 2.3 million.

The combination of rising activity metrics, state-level validator participation, and expanding oracle infrastructure positions the network for a consequential first half of 2026, though the SEI token's price remains well below peaks reached in prior market cycles, according to market data.