Sei (SEI) sustainability report

Sei is present on the following networks: Sei.

The identifier sei-v2 refers to the release in which the Sei network gained an Ethereum-compatible execution layer on top of what had been a Cosmos SDK chain, which reached mainnet in 2024. The network has moved on considerably since then, and what follows describes how it operates now rather than at that release. Sei is a standalone layer 1: it proposes and finalizes its own blocks and settles to no other chain.

Consensus runs on Twin Turbo, a latency-tuned variant of the CometBFT protocol used across Cosmos SDK networks. Voting power is weighted by bonded stake. A single proposer is selected for each height and the remaining validators move through pre-vote and pre-commit rounds; a block committed by more than two thirds of voting power is final at that moment, with no confirmation depth and no reorganization of committed history, and safety holds while fewer than one third of voting power behaves adversarially. Two modifications give the mechanism its name. Proposals travel in compressed form, carrying references to transactions that receiving nodes already hold rather than the transaction bodies themselves, so each node rebuilds the block locally instead of receiving it whole. And validators start executing a proposal speculatively while the voting rounds are still running, discarding the work if the block is not committed, which lifts execution off the critical path. Blocks commit on a sub-second cadence.

Further changes belong in the current picture. A parallel execution client, running transactions concurrently under optimistic concurrency control and falling back to sequential execution where they conflict, together with a restructured state store, reached mainnet during 2026. A redesigned consensus layer in which every validator disseminates its own stream of transactions concurrently — separating data availability from ordering instead of funneling both through one proposer per height — has been specified and tested but was not yet active on mainnet. Separately, governance has approved retiring the chain's Cosmos-native surface, halting new CosmWasm contract deployments and disabling Inter-Blockchain Communication transfers in both directions during 2026.

Sei is present on the following networks: Sei.

Validators and their delegators are the paid participants. Voting power derives from bonded stake, and holders who do not run infrastructure may delegate to an operator and share in its rewards net of a commission the operator sets. Stake taken out of bonding is locked for twenty-one days before it becomes transferable and earns nothing across that window; stake moved directly from one operator to another skips the wait, though the receiving operator is then barred from passing it on again for the same period, and an account may keep only a limited number of such moves open at once. Reward flow comes from transaction fees and from scheduled releases of units set aside at genesis rather than from open-ended issuance.

The penalty design departs from the Cosmos SDK default and is easily misstated. Bonded stake is not confiscated. A validator that goes offline or misbehaves is jailed — removed from the active set and cut off from rewards — but neither its own stake nor its delegators' stake is reduced. Security therefore rests on exclusion from future revenue and on the operational standing of the set rather than on a direct economic forfeit. The redesigned consensus layer under development would introduce a punishable offense for signing conflicting proposals at the same height, which would change this position once it is active.

Users pay in gas, denominated in the network's native asset. Ethereum's typed fee transactions are accepted, but no portion of the fee is burned: base and priority components alike accrue to validators and flow through to their delegators, so activity redistributes value rather than retiring supply. A minimum acceptable gas price is a governance parameter rather than a constant fixed in the client. Execution follows the Ethereum gas schedule with deliberate divergences, most notably a substantially higher charge for writing to persistent storage, which is itself an on-chain parameter and can be retuned by governance without a chain upgrade. There is no recurring storage rent: state paid for when it is written persists without further charge.

Sei is present on the following networks: Sei.

The estimate is constructed from the machines that run the network rather than from a metered reading, which is the correct treatment for a stake-weighted Byzantine-fault-tolerant chain where block production is not a contest of computational work. The first step is sizing the node population: the validator set is enumerated from public chain state, and the surrounding population of full, archive and public endpoint nodes is approximated using network crawlers together with publicly listed infrastructure. A representative hardware profile is then inferred from the specifications the client software states for a node able to keep pace with the chain, which on this network are demanding by the standards of the family, since sub-second block cadence and parallel execution push more work onto each machine. Per-device power draw comes from laboratory measurement taken under load and at rest, and the network total is that draw aggregated across the estimated population over the reporting period, idle hours included.

Two features of the network's current shape bear on the boundary. The consolidation onto a single Ethereum-style execution surface removes the question of whether a second environment should be counted separately; there is one node population and it is counted once. And because the chain finalizes its own blocks rather than posting to a settlement layer, no share of another network's consumption is attributed to it.

The limits are worth stating. Node counts and the hardware mix are inferences from public observation and from stated software specifications, not measurements taken from the machines, and operators are not obliged to publish their configurations. A network in the middle of a staged architectural change is a moving target, so the hardware profile in particular is revisited as client releases alter what a node must do. Where evidence is missing the assumptions adopted sit at the cautious end, making the result likelier to overstate consumption than understate it. Where an asset is issued on more than one network, the share attributed to each is derived from observed on-chain transfer volumes.

Sei is present on the following networks: Sei.

The renewable share is derived from where the network's machines are. Node locations are inferred from publicly observable network data — the addresses peers advertise, the hosting ranges those addresses sit in, and operator disclosures already public — and each located node is assigned to the electricity grid serving its region. Aggregating those assignments gives a weighted view of which grids supply the infrastructure, which is the input the renewable calculation requires.

Resolution is partial in practice. A substantial share of nodes runs in hosting arrangements that identify a provider rather than a site, or behind configurations that disclose nothing dependable at all. The demanding hardware profile this network expects tends to concentrate operators in commercial data centers rather than residential connections, which sharpens regional attribution somewhat but also means a handful of large hosting regions can dominate the weighted result. Where a network's own geographic spread cannot be observed to a usable standard, the spread of a structurally similar network is used as a stand-in — one selected for a comparable validator economy and a comparable cost of entry for operators — and that substitution is a source of uncertainty applied only to the unresolved portion.

Grid assignments are matched against published statistics on how electricity is generated region by region, producing the proportion of the network's electricity drawn from renewable generation. Those statistics are taken from Share of electricity generated by renewables, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy.

Energy intensity is a separate measure from total consumption and is not the total divided by a transaction count. It is marginal: the extra electricity drawn because one more transaction is processed on infrastructure that is already running. Validators here commit blocks on a fixed sub-second cadence whether or not transactions are waiting, so the marginal quantity is small relative to the standing draw and falls further as throughput increases.

Sei is present on the following networks: Sei.

Emissions build on the same geographic work as the energy figures, with a different coefficient applied at the last step. Once nodes have been located and assigned to regional grids, each assignment is paired with the carbon intensity of electricity generation in that region — the mass of carbon dioxide equivalent released per unit of electricity delivered — and estimated consumption is apportioned across regions and converted. Regional carbon intensities vary by an order of magnitude or more, so where the machines sit shapes the emissions result at least as strongly as how much electricity they consume.

The scopes are kept apart. Scope 1 covers emissions from sources the operators control directly, such as fuel burned on site for backup generation; for a network whose validators run commodity servers on purchased electricity it is negligible or zero. Scope 2 covers the indirect emissions embodied in that purchased electricity and accounts for effectively the whole result. Concentration of operators in commercial hosting regions means a comparatively small number of regional coefficients carry most of the weight, so a revision to any one of them moves the total noticeably. Where a node's location cannot be established, the regional profile of a structurally comparable network stands in, and that approximation carries into the emissions result exactly as it does into the energy one.

Carbon intensity coefficients are taken from Carbon intensity of electricity generation, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy and published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Greenhouse gas intensity follows the marginal definition used for energy intensity: the additional emissions attributable to one further transaction beyond those already processed, rather than total emissions divided by transaction count. Because the machines run continuously regardless of demand, that marginal quantity is modest and declines as utilization rises. Results are restated as regional statistics are refreshed and as observation of the node population improves, with assumptions taken under uncertainty set to favor the higher estimate.