Sei, a parallelized EVM Layer-1 blockchain, recorded more than 1.5 million daily active addresses in the week of January 12, 2026, a figure that represents a 100% increase over the prior four months. Total transactions on the network crossed 5 billion for the first time. The milestone arrived alongside a cluster of announcements covering developer tooling partnerships, a protocol upgrade timeline, and original research on quantum cryptography that is unusually substantive for a project blog.

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Network Growth and DeFi Activity

The user growth figures were accompanied by notable on-chain financial activity. Peer-to-peer stablecoin supply on Sei grew 152% over six months, reaching close to $100 million. That metric matters most in regions where dollar-denominated transfers are already a dominant use case. In Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoins account for 43% of all crypto transactions, according to a 2026 Transak report. In South Asia, USDT-based P2P corridors connecting workers in the Gulf with families in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are well established. Sei's average transaction fee sits at roughly $0.0001, reportedly 40x lower than Sui and 80x lower than major EVM chains, making micro-transfers economically practical in ways those networks cannot match at comparable throughput levels. The stablecoin growth in these corridors connects directly to a partnership Sei announced in December 2025 with Xiaomi, which targets the same regions with a native wallet rollout beginning in Q2 2026. That partnership is covered in the section below.

DeFi protocols on Sei posted concrete numbers during the same period. Yei Finance reported $685 million in cumulative swap and bridge volume alongside $7.3 million in total protocol revenue. TakaraLend reached a $200 million total market value and ranked as the second most active EVM lending application by daily addresses. Carbon DeFi's arbitrage fast lane posted a 29% week-over-week volume increase.

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The Xiaomi Partnership

In December 2025, Sei announced a partnership with Xiaomi to pre-install a native crypto wallet on new Xiaomi devices sold outside China and the United States. Xiaomi shipped 168 million devices in 2024 and holds a 24.2% smartphone market share in India, positioning the deal as one of the most direct consumer distribution channels any blockchain project has secured. The integration includes stablecoin support via Mi Pay at more than 20,000 stores, with the full rollout targeting Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America beginning in Q2 2026. For the payments use cases described in the preceding section, the Xiaomi partnership is the most concrete mechanism Sei has announced for converting network growth into real-world stablecoin adoption in the regions where demand is already documented.

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Tooling Partnerships Lower the Cost of Building

Sei announced the Tooling and Infrastructure System, the latest component of its Market Infrastructure Grid (MIG), a six-part partnership framework the project introduced in late 2025 to attract developers and capital. The new system falls within the MIG's Distribution and Access layer and aggregates integrations with node providers including Alchemy (which processes over $100 billion in annual transaction volume and supports clients like OpenSea, Shopify, and Worldcoin), Infura (used by more than 400,000 developers), and QuickNode (covering more than 60 blockchains).

On the wallet side, Privy brings more than 75 million embedded wallet accounts across 1,500 applications, with notable clients including Hyperliquid and Jupiter. Dynamic adds 40 million users through clients including Stripe and Magic Eden. Embedded wallets matter here because traditional crypto wallet setup causes 70 to 90 percent of new users to abandon onboarding. Embedded solutions bring that drop-off rate below 20 percent.

"For years, building onchain meant writing it all yourself," Sei Labs wrote in its announcement of the tooling system. For developers in markets where upfront infrastructure costs are a real constraint, ready access to Alchemy, Infura, and QuickNode through a single chain integration changes the math on whether a project is viable to launch.

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SIP-3 and the Road to EVM-Only Architecture

Sei co-founder Jayendra Jog confirmed that the Sei Giga upgrade, which targets throughput above 200,000 transactions per second, is in active development. The prerequisite is SIP-3, a multi-phase upgrade that removes CosmWasm and native Cosmos transaction support, effectively converting Sei into a pure EVM chain. Version 6.3 of SIP-3, which enabled EVM staking, launched in January 2026. Version 6.4, which disables inbound IBC transfers (the messaging protocol connecting Cosmos-based chains), is scheduled for March 2026. Full SIP-3 completion is targeted for mid-2026, with Giga to follow.

Developers currently using Cosmos-native features on Sei should audit those dependencies before the March cutoff.

"We're working on it and pretty soon we'll have a big announcement," Jog said of the Giga timeline. The quote does not confirm a specific date or milestone. Based on the published SIP-3 schedule, Giga completion is unlikely before the second half of 2026 at the earliest.

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Quantum Security Research

The Sei Research Initiative published a technical paper examining whether post-quantum cryptography is compatible with the performance targets of the Giga upgrade. The paper evaluates multiple signature schemes, with particular attention to leading candidates from the NIST post-quantum standardization process. ML-DSA, one of the primary NIST-standard schemes, produces signatures between 1,312 and 2,592 bytes, compared to 65 bytes for the ECDSA signatures Sei currently uses. At 200,000 TPS, that difference translates to a bandwidth requirement of 0.48 to 1.57 gigabytes per second, a requirement the research identifies as incompatible with Giga's performance targets. The paper proposes a dual-key approach that would bind a post-quantum key to each account before a quantum threat becomes practical, preserving current performance while establishing a migration path.

"Post-quantum security is a throughput problem, not just a math problem," the research team wrote. The paper is worth reading for developers building applications expected to run for more than a few years.

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What Comes Next

Sei and OKCoin Japan held a joint community event in Tokyo on January 28, part of a broader APAC outreach effort that also includes a $50 million Japan Ecosystem Fund focused on gaming and entertainment. Japan's Financial Services Agency regulatory framework positions the country as a compliant entry point for consumer application deployment, a factor directly relevant to projects like Kindred AI that rely on licensed intellectual property. Nineteen applications on Sei now report 100,000 or more monthly active users, and eleven games exceed 300,000. AI companion app Kindred AI, which licenses intellectual property including the Teletubbies brand, crossed 100,000 daily active users.

Two US asset managers, 21Shares and Canary Capital, have filed with the SEC for spot SEI exchange-traded funds. Canary's filing includes a staking component, and the SEC has formally acknowledged the Canary filing and opened a public comment period, a procedural milestone that reflects growing institutional engagement. Approval before mid-2026 is unlikely given the current regulatory timeline, but the filings reflect growing institutional attention. SEI traded at roughly $0.12 during the week these figures were reported and has since declined to approximately $0.07 as of early March 2026, meaning the network activity story and the token price story are currently moving in opposite directions. The Xiaomi pre-installed wallet rollout, scheduled to begin in Q2 2026 across Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, and the Giga upgrade, which follows SIP-3 completion and is targeted for the second half of 2026, are the events most likely to close that gap.