Layer 1 Sei Mainnet Goes Live After Testnet Sees More Than 7.5M Wallets Created

The company behind trading focus layer one Blockchain se announced that its main net is now live after a successful test net phase. Joining us now is say labs co-founder Jay, welcome to the show, Jay. Awesome. Thanks for having me on y'all. All right, tell us why do we need another layer one? Yeah. The core thesis that we have from safe side is that the exchange of digital assets is the most fundamental use case for blockchains. Every single um successful application crypto right now is either directly or indirectly a trading application. And what we observed is that trading applications built on chain right now, they just cannot scale. And rather than keeping iterating on exchange mechanism design, we think that the solution is a fundamental rewrite of the underlying infrastructure. And that's exactly what we've done with today rather than iterating on creating new exchanges. Um Today is just built general purpose layer one Blockchain where every single part of the stack is optimized to help give exchanges the best possible experience. So I if I'm correct me if I'm wrong, but that means ultimately that there the only use case that you, you really see happening here is just speculation on future use cases. Correct? Absolutely not. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, I I because you said it's that the that the main use case right now for, for digital assets is the exchange of digital assets. And, and the reason why people are buying and selling digital assets is that they're taking uh they, they're taking on risk with the idea that those digital assets will increase in value because their use cases will be eventually found. In this case, you're saying say existence is solely to just, yeah, yeah, it it's definitely not purely for speculation. Um I do think speculation is one of the use cases for cryptocurrencies um and blockchains more broadly. Um But I mean, there's a ton of different things that you can do just through the exchange of digital assets. Um What we've noticed is that every single application built in crypto in crypto right now does involve some kind of um exchange of digital assets on into it. So for example, even if you look at a game like step in, they have an in game marketplace built into it which um also uh directly makes it um a trading application. But yeah, I mean, in terms of what qualifies as the exchange of digital assets, it's not purely things type of speculation. It could also be uh things like money transfer. For example, Jeff Feng, the other co-founder of say labs told Coindesk that there's this misconception that say is ad five focused chain. Can you unpack where, why that misconception exists? And what say focus is? Yeah. So when we originally got started a lot of the early projects that we're building on say were exchanges and people tend to have this mental model that any exchange is just tied to D five. That is definitely, first of all, not the case. Um For example, even NFT marketplaces are exchanges and they do not count as D five. But even beyond that, uh things like, like anything that either directly or indirectly gets its demand and its activity um from any kind of exchange, digital assets um that does count as an exchange as well. So say is fundamentally the most general purpose type of box out there. Um And it's not purely focused on D I at the moment, we're seeing many, many different types of applications getting built on, say, uh there's things related to social, there's things related to games. Um There's even roll ups that are getting built on, say right now. And at this point, um we've seen over, I believe over 100 60 170 projects that have already committed to building on a, do you think that the uh $2 billion fully diluted market cap is justified? Yeah, I mean, I'm only associated with, say, labs. We are building the open source software. So I can't really comment on anything related to the token process you brought up the the social aspect. Uh in the coin desk article, I think we spoke to your co-founder and social is a large part of um kind of where you see the future of this industry going. Do you see more decentralized social apps coming to say, labs? What's the value prop there as we see more of those apps uh pop up? Yeah, the core value proposition that they offer seem is that building something on say will offer a better user experience than building that anywhere else on chain. Because right now there's fundamentally a massive disconnect between the web two experience and the web three experience. Like if you go and trade on unice that is fundamentally different than going and trading on Binance or any other centralized entity because it's just much clunkier, much slower. Um And the user experience just has a lot of room for improvement right now. So the core thing that is working on the world we imagine five years from now is that there will no longer be that difference between the web two and the web three experience. Any type of exchange, any type of application that is built on say will be offering that same experience as building it um on an AWS server. And that's really the reason that a lot of teams um have been uh have been buying into this a vision. Are, are, are you saying that you don't like the, the uh mid nineties uh space Jam website uh aspect of D I Oh man, I think that it is a interesting kind of um ecosystem right now. For example, applications like a curve, I think that it does draw in a certain type of user. Um But I think to get larger uh more broader adoption, um it definitely is going to require much cleaner user experiences. What's the difference say from um building, let's say a social app on polygon versus say polygon is of course a layer two on Ethereum, say it's own layer one Blockchain. What's the difference for someone who's developing an app? Yeah. So when we got started, we looked at infrastructure like Polygon and we realized that there were a few major technical components that um could be improved. Uh The first is around time to find out. So say is currently the fastest chain out there right now seeing around 400 millisecond time to finality on Main Net, which makes it a magnitude faster than every other Blockchain in existence. Um For context, most other chains like Sauna, we may have three plus second time to finality. And if you look at ad ML one, it's dozens of seconds if not minutes. So this really leads to much much snappier user experiences, it results in better experiences for anyone that's market making on chain as well. Um And that's just one of the things that we think needs to really improve for the user experience on chain to be matching the user experience off chain. Um Beyond that, we also saw limitations around gas costs throughput. Um and MUV, all of which have been improved on today as well. So it, it to quote uh every ho horrible interviewer, where do you see yourself in five years? I mean, like what do you see the, the basically what, what do you see say in five years? How do you see it growing out? Yeah, I think from a technical standpoint, we really want to enable infrastructure that matches the web two experience. So deploying an app on say, should feel just like deploying an app uh through AWS and just having it be on a centralized server. Um in terms of the ecosystem growth, one of the biggest initiatives that say is focused on uh is helping good developers learn more about the say infrastructure and helps them start building on it because at the end of the day, infrastructure only really succeeds if there's good projects that are getting built on top. Um So five years from now, hopefully say it does have that infrastructure created and it also has um that uh ecosystem that has been formed as well. Uh where there's a lot of really interesting things to be built and used on top. You're gonna be fighting base, you got, you got, I mean, base will be around in five years. I think base will certainly be around in five years. But we do think that there's limitations around uh building anything as a roll up on Ethereum. Uh We just fundamentally do not think that it can scale right now. And also the centralized sequencer approach, we think has many, many limitations um and specifically regulators will come after it. And I think that will force more decentralization of the sequencer set in the future as well. I gotta ask you, uh, why was the airdrop delayed? Uh I think that Safe Foundation has given communications around that. Uh That is not really something that I can comment on from my side. Who's to blame? All right, Jay, it's going, there's got to be one guy there. You gotta blame who, who messed up. Yeah. Come on. There's somebody, some content on that online. Uh I bet it's, there's some lazy guy. You want me start naming names, do you say yes or no? All right, Lawrence Jay. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Awesome. Thanks for having me on y'all. That was say labs co-founder Jay Jog.