Sei Labs just published a whitepaper that reads less like an incremental improvement and more like a full engine swap. The Giga upgrade aims to push the Sei Network past 200,000 transactions per second with sub-400 millisecond finality, numbers that would place it in a performance tier that most Layer 1 chains haven’t even tried to enter.
For context, Ethereum processes roughly 15-30 TPS on its base layer. Solana, the current speed darling, has a theoretical ceiling around 65,000 TPS but real-world throughput that’s significantly lower.
What’s actually under the hood
The centerpiece of the Giga upgrade is something called the Autobahn consensus protocol. Traditional blockchains have one block proposer at a time, creating a bottleneck. Autobahn enables parallel block proposals, meaning multiple validators can propose blocks simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes.
The whitepaper, published on May 19, 2025, outlines a target throughput of 5 gigagas. That’s a measure of computational capacity, and it represents roughly a 40x performance boost over Sei’s prior capabilities of approximately 5,000 TPS. The upgrade also introduces asynchronous execution, which decouples transaction ordering from transaction processing so the chain doesn’t have to wait for one step to finish before starting the next.
