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Sei Network Lands Coinbase EVM Support and Ledger Enterprise Custody as Giga Upgrade Looms

Verse Press | March 11, 2026

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Sei Network has completed one significant infrastructure addition and is preparing a second: Ledger Enterprise activated institutional-grade custody for the network on February 27, 2026, and Coinbase will natively support SEI deposits and withdrawals on the network's EVM architecture beginning in early April 2026. The announcements arrive as Sei pushes toward its next major protocol upgrade, Sei Giga, which targets 200,000 transactions per second and 5 gigagas of throughput per second. The transactions-per-second target represents a roughly 16-fold increase over the network's current live capacity of 12,500 transactions per second.


The Coinbase Migration Window

Coinbase users holding SEI will have their balances automatically converted from Sei's legacy Cosmos-based address format to the new EVM-compatible standard during a maintenance window running April 6 through 8, 2026. SEI transfers will be suspended during that period. No user action is required. "Coinbase will handle the entire migration automatically. You do not need to take any action. Your SEI balance will reflect the new EVM-based tokens after the April 6-8 window," Coinbase stated in official user communications.

The migration is the latest step in Sei's broader architectural shift away from its Cosmos SDK foundation toward full EVM compatibility, a transition executed under Sei Improvement Proposal SIP-3. EVM compatibility lets users interact with Sei using standard wallets such as MetaMask, and lets developers build with familiar tooling including Solidity and Hardhat. The transition has already moved metrics: first-month user retention reached a record 39% in January 2026, after the network enrolled 4.4 million new users in December 2025.

Institutional Custody Layer

Ledger Enterprise's integration brings multi-signature governance, role-based access controls, and hardware-backed transaction signing to institutional holders of SEI. As Sei's announcement stated: "Native Sei support means institutional teams no longer have to choose between Sei's execution speed and enterprise-grade custody."

The Ledger integration joins an existing stack of institutional infrastructure on Sei that includes Circle's native USDC issuance, BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized treasury product, and Ondo Finance's OUSG. The network currently operates at roughly 12,500 transactions per second with approximately 400 milliseconds to finality.

Network Activity and Token Metrics

Sei reached 100 million total wallets by late February 2026, with roughly 1 million EVM daily active users and approximately 2.2 million daily EVM transactions recorded through the same period. The network's stablecoin market cap has grown approximately 90% over four months. Sei Labs describes the chain's performance with the positioning statement "Stablecoins move faster on Sei," and peer-to-peer stablecoin volume is running near $1 billion per week. Within the DeFi ecosystem, decentralized exchange Toro has surpassed $10 million in trading volume, reflecting broader momentum across the network's application layer.

SEI trades at approximately $0.065 as of March 11, 2026, placing the token's market cap at around $421 million (ranked approximately 109th on CoinGecko). Twenty-four-hour trading volume is near $51.6 million. A team allocation unlock of 55.56 million SEI tokens is scheduled for March 15, 2026.

Regional Implications: Africa and Asia

The Coinbase integration carries direct implications for users in Africa. Coinbase functions as a primary fiat on-ramp for Nigerian and South African diaspora communities sending remittances from the UK and the US. Previously, getting funds onto Sei required bridging from a separate EVM wallet. Native deposits eliminate that step.

The regional context is substantial. Sub-Saharan Africa received over $205 billion in total on-chain cryptocurrency value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase. Stablecoins account for roughly 43% of crypto transaction volume in the region. Nigeria represents approximately $92 billion of that total on-chain cryptocurrency value and accounts for roughly 40% of the region's stablecoin inflows. Sei's roughly $1 billion in weekly stablecoin volume could position the chain as a candidate settlement layer for remittance activity if retail adoption follows the infrastructure build.

Sei also has a Q2 2026 rollout planned for a pre-installed crypto wallet on Xiaomi smartphones sold outside mainland China and the United States. Priority markets include Africa, Hong Kong, the EU, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The rollout is supported by a $5 million Global Mobile Innovation Program.

In Southeast Asia, Kindred Labs announced a partnership with IPX, which owns the LINE FRIENDS and BT21 character lines, to launch AI companion experiences on Sei in April 2026 in all markets except China. Kindred already has more than 8 million users on its waitlist. The LINE FRIENDS and BT21 IP carries significant recognition across South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and Indian diaspora communities throughout South and Southeast Asia, representing a consumer onboarding path that does not require any prior familiarity with DeFi.

On March 5, 2026, Sei Labs released AI-optimized developer documentation, providing structured tooling resources aimed in part at developer communities across Southeast Asia and other emerging markets.

What Comes Next

The near-term calendar includes the April 6-8 Coinbase migration window, the Kindred Labs and LINE FRIENDS launch in April, and the Xiaomi device rollout in Q2. Beyond that, Sei Labs is developing Sei Giga, a protocol upgrade targeting 200,000 transactions per second and 5 gigagas of throughput per second. The upgrade centers on three components: Autobahn, a multi-proposer Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol; an asynchronous execution model separating consensus from execution for pipelined block processing; and advanced parallel transaction handling building on Sei's existing Optimistic Concurrency Control. No hard launch date has been published. Co-founder Jayendra Jog has described the upgrade as "the next quantum leap for blockchain," citing its MEV-resistant architecture as a defining feature of the design.