Sei breaks ranks with a bleeding market

While most of the crypto market sold off on June 25, Sei Network's native token $SEI moved in the opposite direction, trading near $0.058 and up roughly 9% on the day as Bitcoin slipped under $60,000 and most major altcoins stayed firmly in the red.

The move was backed by real volume. CoinGecko data shows 24-hour trading volume for $SEI surged around 190% to approximately $72 million, confirming the price action was not a low-liquidity drift. @SeiNetwork was among the day's clear standouts in an otherwise weak market.

Short squeeze and Giga hype fuel the rally

Two catalysts appear to be driving the outperformance. The first is a short squeeze that built around the $0.06 level, forcing leveraged bears to cover their positions and amplifying the upside move. The second is growing anticipation around the network's upcoming Giga upgrade.

Sei Labs published the Giga roadmap in late May 2026, targeting over 200,000 transactions per second and sub-400 millisecond finality. At the core of the performance leap is a protocol called Autobahn, a multi-proposer consensus mechanism. Traditional blockchains rely on a single block proposer at a time, creating a bottleneck. Autobahn lets multiple validators propose blocks simultaneously, which is how throughput scales from thousands to hundreds of thousands of TPS.

For context, Sei's prior throughput benchmarks sat in the range of 5,000 to 12,500 TPS. The Giga upgrade represents roughly a 40 to 50-fold increase in raw capacity. Beyond consensus, the upgrade also introduces asynchronous execution, allowing the network to process transactions in parallel and decouple execution from the consensus layer itself.

Phased rollout, not a single launch

The upgrade is not a single event. Sei Labs is rolling it out progressively throughout 2026, with no single definitive launch date, and has set up a public milestone tracker at giga.seilabs.io.

Alongside the Giga upgrade, Sei Network committed in 2026 to becoming an EVM-only chain, deprecating its original CosmWasm smart contracts and native Cosmos transaction types through community-approved proposal SIP-3. Binance confirmed support for the full transition to EVM compatibility starting June 1.

The day's price action suggests the market is beginning to price in that technical roadmap, at least in the short term. Whether the rally holds will depend on whether the Giga milestones continue to arrive on schedule and whether broader crypto sentiment improves.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

Sources:
Crypto Briefing: Sei Giga Upgrade Roadmap, Targets 200,000 TPS and 400ms Finality
CoinGecko: Sei (SEI) Live Price and Market Data