The report, titled "The foundations of institutional blockchain," draws on more than 40 interviews with practitioners across payments, compliance, and blockchain infrastructure, combined with a review of existing institutional evaluation frameworks. Its central finding is that aggregate transaction processing capacity across major blockchain networks has grown roughly 100 times since 2019, reaching an estimated 3,400 transactions per second (TPS) combined. That shift, the authors argue, moves the conversation away from whether blockchains can handle institutional volume and toward whether institutions can trust how those networks are governed and operated.

The collaboration follows Sei's formal entry into Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program in May 2026, a framework connecting digital asset networks to Mastercard's global payments infrastructure. The report is presented as the product of months of joint research.

A Framework for Moving from Pilot to Production

The report introduces a five-stage model for how institutions adopt blockchain technology: Eligibility, Validation, Pilot, Production, and Scale. Each stage comes with designated decision-makers and specific proof standards that a project must meet before advancing. Alongside this, the report outlines five evaluation pillars, covering performance metrics, throughput capabilities, governance structures, operational maturity, and additional assessment criteria. The weighting among those pillars shifts depending on the use case. Real-time payment applications place the most emphasis on throughput; treasury and asset management workflows treat governance as the top priority.

Christian Rau, Mastercard's Senior Vice President for Digital Assets and Blockchain covering Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, commented that robust evaluation frameworks examine blockchains across trust, scalability, and compliance considerations. Jack Lipstone, Business Development Director at Sei Labs, noted that institutions tend to favor blockchains that combine throughput, reliability, and governance in a single package. Both quotes as published in the Sei blog post were partially truncated; the full report has not been confirmed as publicly available in a standalone document.

The report cites more than $27 billion in tokenized bonds, funds, deposits, and other instruments currently on-chain, and points to BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund as a leading example. The report noted BUIDL had surpassed $2.5 billion in assets under management at the time of reporting, with independent sources placing AUM closer to $2.87 billion as of late July 2026. The broader tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market, meaning traditional financial assets represented as tokens on a blockchain, reached roughly $32 billion in July 2026, a 170 percent increase over 12 months. At least six asset classes individually crossed $1 billion on-chain, including private credit, US Treasuries, corporate bonds, commodities, non-US government debt, and institutional alternative funds.

Sei's Own Numbers Tell a More Complicated Story

Sei positions itself as a high-performance financial infrastructure chain. Its mainnet supports a theoretical maximum of around 12,500 TPS with finality under 400 milliseconds, and an upcoming network upgrade called Giga targets 200,000-plus TPS and sub-250ms finality. The Giga whitepaper v2 was released on July 1, 2026. In practice, however, independently measured activity has dropped sharply. Daily transactions fell from a peak of roughly 3 million in February 2026 to under 25,000 by June, with actual TPS recorded at approximately 1, down from approximately 38 TPS earlier in the year. That gap between theoretical capacity and live utilization is worth noting as Sei promotes itself to institutional audiences.

The SEI token trades at roughly $0.04 as of August 25, 2026, reflecting a market capitalization near $317 million and a fully diluted valuation around $471 million. The token sits approximately 96 percent below its all-time high of $1.14. Token price does not directly measure the utility of the underlying network for the institutional use cases described in the report, but it is relevant context for any institution or developer evaluating the ecosystem's overall health and liquidity.

What This Means for Africa and South Asia

The report carries direct practical weight in African markets. Mastercard is not producing this framework in isolation from its regional operations. In May 2026, it partnered with Yellow Card, the continent's largest licensed stablecoin operator, to build stablecoin-enabled payment infrastructure across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and the UAE. That partnership operates under Mastercard's EEMEA designation, covering Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, which explains the UAE's inclusion alongside the African pilot countries. The governance and settlement criteria outlined in the report form the intellectual basis for those deployments.

Nigeria, which received an estimated $92.1 billion in crypto in 2025 and ranks sixth globally by volume, is one of the five priority countries. The Naira depreciated more than 70 percent between 2023 and 2025, and Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission issued formal Digital Asset Service Provider licenses in 2025. Both developments make the governance and settlement standards outlined in the report directly relevant to Nigerian market participants. Kenya has already run stablecoin pilots that cut cross-border remittance fees from 29 percent to 2 percent, against a backdrop of $4 billion in annual diaspora remittances currently subject to traditional fees of 7 to 10 percent. Kenya's Capital Markets Authority also maintains a regulatory sandbox for tokenized instruments, a structural foundation that the five-stage adoption framework could connect to directly.

The five-stage adoption framework gives developers and regulators in both countries a concrete checklist for building or approving institutional-grade infrastructure. That said, the framework's emphasis on governance and finality confidence runs up against real structural limits in Sub-Saharan Africa, where rural internet penetration sits at roughly 24 percent and secondary market liquidity remains thin for most tokenized instruments. Tokenized assets may create entry points without credible exit mechanisms for most markets outside a handful of larger economies, which makes the liquidity gap more than an abstract concern.

For South Asia, no market is named directly in the report or in Mastercard's current deployment plans, but the implications are significant. India is the world's largest remittance-receiving country, taking in more than $125 billion annually, and already operates one of the world's most extensive retail payments networks through UPI, which serves more than 300 million users. The governance and operational maturity criteria outlined here map closely to the questions that Indian regulators at SEBI and the RBI would need answered before any tokenization program could scale. A useful regional benchmark comes from Southeast Asia: the Philippines recorded an 85-plus percent retail subscription rate on government tokenized bonds, a result that researchers have flagged as a concrete model for how retail securities tokenization discussions might proceed in South Asian markets. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan all have large diaspora populations and high remittance dependency, making lower-friction settlement rails a material economic issue rather than a theoretical one. Pakistan is a notable case in this context, as one of the few major markets that maintained explicit crypto restrictions into this period; those restrictions have progressively softened through 2025 and 2026, making the institutional framework questions raised here increasingly relevant.

What Comes Next

Mastercard's collaboration with the ADI Foundation, announced alongside BlackRock and Franklin Templeton in late 2025, adds weight to the view that major financial institutions are now working to establish shared standards for on-chain asset infrastructure rather than competing on proprietary frameworks. The Sei report contributes a specific evaluation vocabulary to that effort. Whether institutions use it as a checklist or a reference point, the shift from debating blockchain performance to debating blockchain governance represents a meaningful change in how the sector is framing its own maturation. How much influence this framework ultimately carries will depend in part on whether ecosystems like Sei can close the gap between theoretical capacity and live utilization, a question the current data leaves open.