GateLive AMA Recap-Sei
Tell me more about your background
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
My journey in the Web3 realm began by joining a founding team on Solana, where I played a pivotal role as the Head of Marketing & Growth. My responsibilities encompassed orchestrating the development of cross-chain infrastructure tailored for both EVM & Non-EVM compatible chains.
Drawing on that experience, I subsequently joined Trader Joe, focusing on supporting their go-to-market strategy for the multichain expansions efforts of the DEX, deploying it onto Arbitrum and BNB chain from a marketing perspective. In my current role at Sei Labs, I wear the hat of a Marketing and Growth Lead, channeling my expertise to amplify eco growth and evolve our market presence.
What is Sei?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
Sei is an open-source, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain, specifically designed in response to the fundamental use case of blockchains, the ability to exchange digital assets. As digital assets - from NFTs and Gaming assets to DeFi - continue to grow, so too does the demand for highly performant blockchains. Answering this call, Sei is tailored to be the ideal destination for high-performance, top user experience applications in Web3.
With this in mind, Sei has been built with an emphasis on speed, performance, and technological innovation. It boasts among the fastest time to finality of any blockchain, potentially higher throughput than the theoretical maximum of any Rollup built on Ethereum, and low-latency, all thanks to its use of cutting-edge technologies. These include parallel processing, instant block finality, and novel mechanisms for efficient block propagation and processing.
Story of how Sei got started?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
The inception of Sei can be traced back to insights gained from our team’s diverse experiences in the tech and finance industries. A pivotal moment occurred when our co-founders, Jay, worked as an early engineer at Robinhood. There, he discerned significant challenges linked to the lack of transparency in centralized exchanges. Such revelations emphasized the paramount importance of decentralization and highlighted the pivotal role of trading and the exchange of digital asset in the blockchain realm.
Recognizing that many existing platforms often overlooked these core aspects and lacked the ability to scale, our founders united in 2021 with a vision to craft a decentralized platform that would mirror the ethos of user-centric platforms like Robinhood. This shared ambition naturally transitioned into the development of Sei, an open-source, general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain.
Designed specifically for the efficient trading and exchange of a vast range of digital assets, Sei endeavors to combine the virtues of decentralization with a user experience on par with top-tier Web2 platforms.
You describe Sei as being optimized for trading and the exchange of digital assets, why optimize for just that use case?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
The exchange of assets is the most fundamental use case of blockchains. Whether it’s tokens, NFTs, or in-game assets, the exchange function is vital to the user experience. By focusing on optimizing for this use case, we’ve ensured that Sei can deliver a superior performance for these core functions, leading to a more efficient and seamless trading experience. You’ve got to start with the user experience and work backward to the technology.
Where do you see trading heading towards over the next few years?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
With the continuous growth of Web3 and the increasing proliferation of digital assets, the need to exchange these assets is only going to continue to grow. Regulatory pressure on centralized exchanges is likely to further drive volume and activity on-chain. As this trend continues, Sei aims to lead the evolution, providing a robust infrastructure capable of meeting the demands of the next generation of on-chain trading platforms.
What is the vision for Sei? What happens if you’re successful?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
Our vision for Sei is to establish it as the default Layer 1 platform for all on-chain trading. In success, any trading app, be it a DeFi DEX, an NFT marketplace, or a gaming platform will operate better on Sei than any other Layer 1, thanks to our specialized optimizations. If Sei is successful, the tradeoff of being decentralized no longer exists, DEXs and trading apps can operate near EXACTLY like Web2 products.
Besides DeFi, are there any other types of apps in the Sei eco?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
While DeFi is a key part of the Sei eco, it is not the sole focus. Sei’s infrastructure is optimized to perform excellently for all exchange applications. This includes NFT marketplaces, gaming economies, social trading apps, and more. Sei’s unique infrastructure makes it ideal for a wide range of applications within the crypto world.
Why did you decide to build Sei as a Layer 1 and not a Layer 2?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
Choosing to build Sei as a Layer 1 solution was a strategic decision anchored in our aim to holistically address the specialized demands of trading applications, encompassing speed, throughput, reliability, and the challenge of frontrunning.
Whereas Layer 2 solutions are layered atop pre-existing networks, a bespoke Layer 1 blockchain grants us the ability to meticulously curate an optimized trading environment from its very foundation. This foundational approach empowers Sei to directly tackle and rectify the intrinsic limitations that have constrained many existing infrastructures, especially in terms of throughput and scalability.
How did you think about design decisions and tradeoffs as you were building Sei?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
While building Sei, we prioritized optimizing the user experience for trading apps, ensuring that trading could be done quickly, efficiently, and securely. Given the distinct demands of such applications, we grappled with the “Exchange Trilemma,” aiming to strike a balance between scalability, decentralization, and capital efficiency. Central to our design philosophy was the conviction that digital asset exchange is a cornerstone use case for blockchain technology. Therefore, our efforts were channeled towards providing an infrastructure tailored for high-speed, high-volume trading.
How does that compare to other Layer 1s like Solana, Sui and Aptos?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
Sei, in its design and technical approach, differs from other Layer 1s like Solana, Sui, and Aptos. Focusing on the unique needs of trading applications, Sei has achieved an industry leading time-to-finality of around 390ms.
Notably, Sei leverages two novel advancements in consensus research to offer Twin-Turbo consensus, which significantly accelerates the chain’s processing speed, and the built-in parallelization, which optimizes transaction costs and amplifies throughput.
To amplify the developer experience, Sei is actively working towards introducing Multi-language support. While other Layer 1 platforms possess their own attributes, Sei’s meticulous design choices position it as an optimal infrastructure for trading applications.
For our listeners, what’s the best way to get involved with Sei and keep up?
Phillip（Marketing&Growth Lead of Sei）
There are several ways to get involved with Sei. If you’re a developer or a builder, we invite you to join the numerous teams already building on the Sei eco. You can also explore the apps and partners in the Sei Eco or delve into the details of Sei’s technological innovations in the official whitepaper.
For community members, we highly encourage you to participate in our Marines International Ambassador Program, a specially curated initiative designed to foster and accelerate growth within the Sei community. The program offers a unique opportunity to engage, contribute, and collaborate with a diverse community, while also gaining access to a wealth of resources and opportunities to enhance your understanding and involvement in the world of blockchain and digital asset trading.
