Sei abandons Cosmos and fully shifts to EVM: Can the Giga upgrade bring a breakthrough in value?

In early April 2026, Sei Network officially completed the final stage of executing the SIP-3 upgrade. This high-speed Layer 1 blockchain, once known for its Cosmos SDK + EVM dual-chain architecture, has completely bid farewell to the Cosmos ecosystem and pivoted to a pure EVM blockchain. From its peak moment when it launched on the mainnet in 2023, to making such an aggressive architecture shift after experiencing more than a 60% price pullback—Sei’s gamble is driven not only by the internal logic of technological iteration, but also by existential anxiety amid changing public chain competitive dynamics.

This article will analyze, from multiple dimensions, the technical essence of SIP-3, the migration timeline, market reaction, progress on institutional partnerships, and the competitive landscape between Sei and mainstream chains such as Solana. It attempts to answer a core question: after giving up its dual-chain identity and going all-in to embrace the EVM, just how big is Sei’s chance of winning?

From Dual-Chain to Pure EVM: An Architecture Slimdown That Could Decide Life or Death

Sei’s architectural transformation was not a scheme conceived overnight. In May 2025, the Sei community passed a governance proposal numbered SIP-3, approving a long-term plan to transition the network from a Cosmos–EVM dual-architecture to a pure EVM chain. After nearly a year of phased execution, this transformation finally completed the deployment of all core modules in the first quarter of 2026.

SIP-3 was designed to be carried out in three phases. Version 6.3 went live on the testnet in January 2026, with staking functionality fully migrated to the EVM interface; version 6.4 was executed in February, formally disabling inbound IBC transfers—Cosmos native tokens (including ATOM and USDC.n) can no longer enter Sei via cross-chain transfers; version 6.5 launched in March, removing Sei’s native oracle and replacing it with established external oracle solutions such as Chainlink, API3, and Pyth. In early April, all code changes became effective on the mainnet. According to Sei’s official documentation, after the upgrade is completed, only EVM addresses can initiate transactions; all Cosmos message-handling functionality has been removed and marked as deprecated.

The SIP-3 upgrade completed its core deployment at the end of the first quarter of 2026, and from early April, Sei Network has been operating in a pure EVM chain state.

Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, explained the underlying logic of this transition with a classic analogy from automotive engineering: to make a car faster, you either add power or lighten the weight. To make a car extremely fast, you do both. SIP-3 is about weight reduction, while the Giga upgrade is about boosting power. According to disclosures from Sei Labs, this architecture migration removed tens of thousands of lines of Cosmos-related code, significantly reducing maintenance complexity at the protocol layer and redundancy in execution paths.

From an engineering perspective, abandoning the dual-chain architecture means Sei no longer needs to maintain two separate execution environments. The development team’s resources can be more concentrated on optimizing EVM performance. The core trade-off of this decision is: in exchange for interoperability within the Cosmos ecosystem, Sei gains higher execution efficiency and a lower migration barrier for developers.

SIP-3 Timeline and Market Response

During the execution of SIP-3, the market reaction showed significant divergence. On the one hand, after the upgrade announcement, the SEI token price saw a short-term rebound of more than 10%. On the other hand, on-chain data shows Sei’s total value locked (TVL) fell by about 7.3% during this period, and some liquidity appeared to temporarily flow out structurally during the process of migrating from the Cosmos ecosystem.

As of April 7, 2026, based on Gate market data, the Sei (SEI) price is $0.05265; the 24-hour trading volume is $296,590; the market capitalization is $3.61 million; and the market share is 0.021%. SEI’s price changed by -2.50% over the past 24 hours, +2.19% over the past 7 days, -17.84% over the past 30 days, and -63.66% over the past year. SEI’s all-time high price is $1.14, and its all-time low price is $0.04847. The current circulating supply is 6.85B SEI, while both total supply and maximum supply are 10B SEI. The market sentiment rating is neutral.

Narrative Divergence: What Is the Market Arguing About?

Regarding Sei’s architectural transition, the market has formed two sharply opposing narrative positions.

Compromise thesis: The EVM ecosystem wins, and Sei abandons its differentiation

Critics argue that Sei’s move out of the Cosmos ecosystem toward the EVM camp, in essence, means abandoning its most unique differentiation label. The Cosmos ecosystem centers on the IBC protocol, emphasizing application-chain flexibility and sovereignty, while the EVM ecosystem’s advantages come from Ethereum’s developer network effects and liquidity aggregation. Sei chose to align with the latter, which some observers interpret as an implicit rejection of the Cosmos ecosystem’s prospects. On community platforms such as the Gate Square, users have commented that the dual-chain architecture was originally a selling point—so now it’s a compromise? The EVM ecosystem is attractive, but following the crowd is kind of dull; committing to surrender so decisively also makes the previous dual-chain architecture designers feel awkward.

Pragmatist thesis: Where developers are, public chains should be there

Supporters emphasize that EVM’s dominance in the developer ecosystem is irreversible—over 90% of decentralized application development activity takes place on EVM-compatible chains. Previously, Sei introduced parallelized EVM execution through its v2 upgrade, but retaining the Cosmos layer meant developers had to learn two separate systems simultaneously, creating a significant cognitive barrier. After shifting to a pure EVM architecture, developers can use standard toolchains directly, such as MetaMask, Hardhat, and Foundry, with no modifications needed to deploy Solidity contracts. From this perspective, abandoning Cosmos is not a compromise, but a rational response to market realities.

Speculation thesis: Can the technical transition translate into value capture?

Another voice is relatively neutral but deeper: optimizing technical architecture is one thing, while value capture is another. Sei currently has more than 1.4 million daily active addresses, ranking first among all EVM-compatible chains, but TVL is only about $185 million to $250 million—far below what would be expected relative to its user scale. The divergence between user activity and locked value suggests that a large amount of on-chain activity may be low-value or even speculative, and that truly robust financial application scenarios have not yet been fully established. Whether SIP-3 can change this situation depends on how quickly the subsequent Giga upgrade is rolled out, as well as the deployment cadence of institutional-grade applications.

Sei Autobahn Upgrade: A Technical Promise of 200,000 TPS

After completing the weight-reduction work of SIP-3, Sei’s next milestone is a performance upgrade known as Giga. Sei Autobahn’s consensus mechanism is the core component of the Giga upgrade. Its goal is to raise network throughput to more than 200,000 TPS while keeping block finality confirmation time within 400 milliseconds.

From a technical roadmap perspective, Sei uses an optimistic parallel execution model, which is highly similar in spirit to Solana’s Sealevel mechanism—both allow multiple non-conflicting transactions to be executed simultaneously. The difference is that Sei’s parallelization is done automatically, so developers don’t need to explicitly declare account dependency relationships as they do on Solana. According to Sei’s official documentation, the block time of Sei EVM is 400 milliseconds, comparable to Solana; however, Sei’s final confirmation time (within a single block) is significantly faster than Solana’s by about 2.5 to 4.5 seconds.

At the level of developer tooling, Sei launched a market infrastructure grid in January 2026, directly integrating top EVM infrastructure providers such as Alchemy, Infura, and QuickNode into its parallelized blockchain. Collectively, these providers handle more than $100 billion in annual transaction volume and serve top applications such as OpenSea and MetaMask. In addition, embedded wallet integrations by Privy and Dynamic are reportedly able to reduce the wallet creation leakage rate from 70% to 90% down to below 20%.

The technical roadmap of the Giga upgrade itself is feasible, but the target throughput of 200,000 TPS needs to be validated under real mainnet load conditions. In the currently available public data, there is no third-party independent performance testing report; therefore, this number should be treated as a design target rather than achieved performance.

Institutional Narrative: Can RWA Collaboration Become an Anchor of Value?

Another narrative line for Sei beyond SIP-3 is its deep push into real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Since the second half of 2025, Sei has announced cooperation relationships with multiple leading asset management institutions.

Through the Securitize platform, BlackRock’s ICS USD Liquidity Fund and Brevan Howard’s macro fund have been tokenized and deployed on the Sei network. Apollo Global Management (about $840 billion in assets under management as of 2025) has issued a tokenized ACRED diversified credit fund on Sei through Securitize. In addition, institutions such as Hamilton Lane have also deployed compliant tokenized fund product offerings on Sei.

All of the institutional partnerships mentioned above have been publicly announced, but most are still at an early stage. The current on-chain locked AUM scale is around the $100 million range, which—compared with institutions’ overall trillion-dollar management scale—still places them in a pilot phase.

The strategic intent behind this narrative is to shift public-chain competition from “TPS arms-race” dynamics to asset-carrying capacity—who can custody more real capital and win more institutional trust will gain an advantage in the next round of competition. Unlike Solana’s path focusing on consumer-grade applications and Sui’s emphasis on architectural innovation, Sei is trying to position itself as a settlement layer for institutional assets.

Whether the RWA narrative can be transformed into sustained on-chain economic activity depends on three factors: first, how complete the regulatory compliance framework becomes; second, whether platforms such as Securitize can continuously onboard more asset management institutions; and third, whether Sei’s performance can support the high-frequency settlement demands of institutional use cases. At present, all three are still in early-stage validation, with significant uncertainty.

Sei vs Solana: Different Roads or the Same Destination?

Comparing Sei with Solana is essentially examining the pros and cons of two different EVM-compatible approaches.

Solana’s core advantage lies in its already proven large-scale user ecosystem and mature DeFi application matrix. In terms of on-chain user base, Solana’s daily active addresses are also high, but regarding EVM compatibility, Solana needs to achieve it via third-party solutions such as Neon EVM rather than native support. Sei’s choice is native EVM + parallel execution—developers don’t need any adaptation layer and can deploy Solidity contracts directly to obtain execution speeds close to Solana’s.

The choice of these two technical routes reflects different ecosystem strategies. Solana maintains its independent execution environment (Sealevel + SVM) and connects EVM liquidity through bridges and compatibility layers. Sei, by contrast, fully embraces EVM standards. It sacrifices technical uniqueness in exchange for a lower migration barrier for developers. In the short term, Sei’s path makes it easier to attract existing Ethereum developer communities; in the long term, Solana’s independence implies a larger scope for innovation at the protocol level.

Sei’s official documentation includes a dedicated developer guide for migrating from Solana to Sei EVM. It clearly lists familiar parallelization models and 400-millisecond block time as the core selling points to attract Solana developers. To a certain extent, this indicates that Sei does not view Solana purely as a competitor; instead, it sees Solana as an ecosystem whose developer resources can be compatible with and absorbed.

Multi-Scenario Projections: Sei’s Three Possible Paths

Scenario One | Optimistic Path

Giga upgrade achieves real-world throughput of 200,000 TPS under mainnet conditions; RWA collaboration expands gradually from pilots to scaled deployments; institutional capital continues to flow in. In this scenario, Sei’s user activity advantage (1.4 million daily active addresses) translates into TVL growth, and the token price returns to levels aligned with network activity. Conditions to meet: the technical upgrade has no major vulnerabilities; at least 3 to 5 leading asset management institutions list Sei as one of their primary settlement chains.

Scenario Two | Baseline Path

The Giga upgrade achieves part of its performance targets (e.g., 50,000 to 100,000 TPS); RWA collaboration stays stable but expansion speed is limited. Sei holds a place in the EVM high-speed public chain track, but it is difficult to challenge the dominance of Solana and Ethereum L2s. TVL grows moderately; the token price fluctuates with market cycles, and the valuation remains near the average level among comparable projects.

Scenario Three | Pessimistic Path

The Giga upgrade encounters unexpected technical bottlenecks, or institutional cooperation progresses slowly due to regulatory or market reasons. The liquidity loss caused by exiting the Cosmos ecosystem is not offset by newly added liquidity in the EVM ecosystem, leading to declining network activity. In this scenario, SIP-3’s weight-reduction strategy fails to translate into “building muscle,” and Sei lacks differentiated competitiveness in the EVM red-ocean market.

Conclusion

Sei giving up Cosmos and fully switching to EVM is one of the most talked-about architecture events in the 2026 public chain landscape. From a technical standpoint, SIP-3 has a clear execution path and a defined timetable, and the team’s engineering capabilities have been preliminarily validated through phased rollout. From a market standpoint, the gap between price and user data reflects that investors’ doubts about value capture capabilities have not yet been dispelled. From the competitive landscape perspective, Sei chose a path that is different from Solana but may not necessarily end at the same destination—whether the combination of native EVM compatibility and parallel execution efficiency can truly unlock Ethereum ecosystem developers’ resources will be the core yardstick for measuring the outcome of this gamble.

For industry observers, Sei’s transition offers a case worth continuously tracking: in a public chain market that increasingly emphasizes compatibility and developer experience, which matters more—the differentiation of the technical route or the pragmatism of the ecosystem strategy? The answer may not lie in the SIP-3 code itself, but in where the developers and institutions who truly “vote with their feet” go in the next 12 to 18 months.