During a busy trading day last year, I tried sending a USDC transaction on Ethereum. I remember watching the confirmation time stretch past two minutes while gas fees spiked to nearly $10.
As someone building blockchain infrastructure, that moment exemplified everything wrong with the current state of digital payments. Here I was, trying to move what should be programmable money, and it felt slower and more expensive than sending a traditional wire transfer.
That frustrating experience wasn’t unique to us at Sei Labs. After years of hype and speculation, crypto is no longer just a bet on the future, it’s quietly becoming the infrastructure of the present, particularly when it comes to payments. But as we’ve learned firsthand, the technology hasn’t kept pace with the ambition.
At the center of this shift are stablecoins. Once seen as a bridge between digital assets and the traditional financial system, they’ve found product-market fit in their own right. In fact, stablecoins settled nearly $30 trillion onchain in the past year alone, and they’re only getting started.
But as volumes grow and real-world use cases multiply, from cross-border payments to global e-commerce, one truth is becoming increasingly clear: stablecoins have outgrown the infrastructure they run on. If digital payments are going to 10x in volume, it requires infrastructure to match, and that’s exactly why we built Sei.
The Promise and Problem of Onchain Dollars
It’s clear that stablecoins represent one of the best examples of crypto’s utility today. They provide faster, cheaper, and more transparent ways to move money globally, without relying on a fragmented network of correspondent banks or outdated rails. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently summed it up well: stablecoin rails are now faster, cheaper, and more global than legacy alternatives.
Yet despite their advantages, the infrastructure powering these assets has barely kept up. I’ve experienced this frustration countless times, watching what should be instant digital money crawl along at the pace of legacy systems.
Most of today’s stablecoin volume still flows through chains that were never designed for institutional-scale payments. Congestion, unpredictable fees, and settlement times that can stretch for minutes are wholly unacceptable in modern finance, where milliseconds matter for trading and real-time payments.
When we built Sei, we obsessed over eliminating these pain points. Instead of waiting minutes for a transaction to confirm, our users get finality in under 400 milliseconds. That’s like sending a message and having it arrive before you even blink. Gas fees that once cost dollars now cost fractions of a cent.
This is precisely the problem Sei was built to solve. While established chains like Ethereum benefit from network effects and deep liquidity, they simply can’t deliver the performance that the future of payments demands. We designed Sei from the ground up to bridge this gap.
Why Infrastructure Matters
The payments industry is massive. Global interbank transfers, remittances, commerce, and capital markets move hundreds of trillions of dollars each year. If even a fraction of that volume shifts onchain, today’s infrastructure won’t cut it.
I’ve spoken with countless developers and enterprises who are eager to build on blockchain rails but get discouraged by the current limitations. The growing institutional interest in stablecoins is starting to expose this critical gap. While many chains advertise speed and throughput as table stakes, few can actually deliver at scale when it matters.
As demand accelerates, performance will quickly become the key differentiator. Chains that have been designed for high performance from day one, rather than retrofitting to catch up, will stand apart in the new wave of adoption.
We’ve proven what’s possible with Sei: our upcoming giga upgrade achieved 5 gigagas per second on our devnet. That’s roughly 200,000 transactions per second with near-instant finality. Compare that to Ethereum’s 15 transactions per second and 12+ second block times. It’s like comparing a sports car to a horse-drawn carriage.
By reducing latency from seconds to milliseconds and increasing throughput by orders of magnitude, we’re making possible use cases that were once out of reach: high-frequency trading, programmatic disbursements, instant in-game payments, and seamless global commerce.
Why Sei Will Power the Future of Digital Payments
As crypto matures, we’ve watched the bar for performance rise exponentially. Developers, users, and institutions are no longer willing to accept slow, expensive transactions as the price of decentralization. They’re gravitating toward chains that actively deliver scalable infrastructure, chains like Sei.
We’re already seeing this migration accelerate in real-time. DeFi protocols are launching on Sei to escape mainnet congestion. Payment companies are building on Sei to offer their users instant settlement. Enterprises are choosing us because we can handle their transaction volumes without breaking down.
In the coming years, there will be a clear fork in the blockchain ecosystem: chains like Sei that support lightning-fast, high-volume stablecoin flows will form the new backbone of onchain finance, while legacy chains risk being relegated to store-of-value applications.
When we started building Sei, we knew we weren’t just creating faster transactions. We were laying the technical foundation that aligns crypto infrastructure with the demands of a rapidly digitizing global economy. When the speed of money depends on the speed of the underlying chain, Sei delivers the performance that matters.
The Rails Are Ready
Stablecoins are becoming the core layer of programmable money and at Sei we’ve built the infrastructure that treats them accordingly. Unlike other blockchains that can only promise high performance, we are delivering it today.
There is no longer a question of whether the transition to high-performance payment rails will happen; it’s already happening today. The question is which blockchain will power the future of digital finance. With our proven ability to handle massive throughput, sub-second finality, and near-zero fees, Sei is positioned to be that blockchain.
The future of payments is here, and it runs on Sei. We’ve built the rails; now it’s time to power the next $300 trillion in global transactions.