Sei, a layer-1 (L1) blockchain focused on trading, bagged $30 million in fresh funding at a valuation of $800 million, according to a press release. Sei’s co-founder said the firm would use the new funds to grow its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region and find the right strategic partners.

Sei Valued at $800M After New Funding

Trading-focused L1 blockchain firm Sei said it had secured $30 million in two strategic funding rounds, taking its valuation to $800 million. Investors participating in the rounds include Jump, Distributed Global, Multicoin, Asymmetric, Flow Traders, Hypersphere, and Bixin Ventures.

Sei Labs co-founder Jayendra Jog said the fresh capital would help the company facilitate growth and increase its presence in the Asia-Pacific region and connect with the “right strategic partners, especially going into mainnet,” Further, the funding will also allow Sei to reinforce its position as one of the leading layer-1 solution and further promote the global development of digital assets, Sei said in the press release.

Jog said the primary objective is to “build the best infrastructure for exchanges.” He said crypto projects also use Sei to build games, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces, and rollups.

“It’s not just DeFi, but other [applications] that derive demand from trading.”

– added Jog.

The new funding comes less than a year after Sei completed a $5 seed round, which Sei said wasn’t “just focused on capital, but to get the right set of partners.” More recently, the blockchain announced the launch of a $50 million ecosystem and liquidity fund to foster the burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on its platform.

What is Sei?

As opposed to other multipurpose L1 blockchains developers used by developers to build projects, Sei’s primary focus is on the development of a crypto trading network through its chain. Some of the biggest L1 blockchains for building projects include Ethereum, Near, Solana, Avalanche, and more.

Led by a team of experienced developers and executives from Goldman Sachs, Databricks, Robinhood, Google, and Nvidia, Sei believes that existing blockchain networks are not optimized for high-frequency trading and are too slow for real-world financial applications.

Sei currently has more than 120 projects building on top of its blockchain. The company said its most recent public testnet involved 3.6 million unique users and processed over 35 million transactions in less than a month in March. Sei is still in its public testnet phase, though it plans to roll out its mainnet later this year, said Jog.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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