From Wall Street to the blockchain When Robinhood halted GameStop ($GME) trading at the height of the January 2021 short-squeeze frenzy, it exposed a fault line that two engineers could not i
When Robinhood halted GameStop ($GME) trading at the height of the January 2021 short-squeeze frenzy, it exposed a fault line that two engineers could not ignore. @jeffdfeng (Jeff Feng), a former Goldman Sachs technology banker who later moved into venture investing at Coatue, and @jayendra_jog (Jay Jog), a former Robinhood software engineer, saw a centralised system buckle under pressure and decided to build something different.
The two co-founded @Sei_Labs in 2022, setting out to create trading infrastructure with no single point of failure. Most of the startup's early engineering team came from Robinhood's clearing team, bringing firsthand knowledge of exactly where centralised systems break down.
Market makers Flow Traders and Hudson River Trading backed the project, joining a $5 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and GSR. The capital enabled @SeiNetwork to build out its mainnet, which launched in August 2023.
Sei Labs is not standing still. The team is now rolling out Giga, an ambitious chain rebuild that targets 200,000 transactions per second with finality under 400 milliseconds. The upgrade is being delivered through three major components: Autobahn, Ares, and Eidos, each targeting a different part of Sei's infrastructure, covering consensus, transaction execution, and blockchain storage.
The project is targeting more than 200,000 TPS, compared with the network's previous throughput range of roughly 5,000 to 12,500 TPS. The storage (Eidos) and execution (Ares) engines are already live following the v6.6 mainnet upgrade in August 2026. The final component, Autobahn, will introduce a multi-proposer consensus design, replacing the single-proposer model to unlock foundational throughput gains, and its mainnet activation is the next major technical milestone.
Sei's internal testing has demonstrated more than 200,000 TPS under controlled conditions, though those results do not represent sustained mainnet performance. The gap between a controlled benchmark and real-world load remains the key variable to watch as the rollout continues.
What started as a reaction to a retail trading crisis has grown into a serious infrastructure play, with Sei Labs positioning $SEI as a high-throughput home for DeFi and on-chain trading applications.
SourcesBloomberg: Ex-Goldman Banker's Crypto Startup Backed By Flow Traders, Hudson River TradingCrypto.news: Sei starts phased Eidos upgrade to prepare network for 200,000 TPSThe Block: Top market makers back new blockchain for trading founded by Goldman Sachs and Robinhood alums
