Coinbase set to list Sei as blockchain's mainnet goes live

Coinbase announced Tuesday it is adding support for SEI, after the blockchain's mainnet went live.

"Trading is anticipated to begin later today, if liquidity conditions are met," the U.S. exchange tweeted. Despite the news, the Sei token declined 3.6% to $0.19 at 11:30 a.m. ET, according to CoinGecko.

The news comes after multiple centralized exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitget, KuCoin and Upbit announced SEI listings 

Sei Labs announced the launch of their mainnet beta, which is optimized for high speed digital asset trading at scale, after completing a successful testnet phase. The network is positioning itself as a highly performant blockchain capable of dealing with increased demand for NFT and gaming asset transactions.

“Current web 3 infrastructure is un-scalable, congested, and still too slow," Jeff Feng, co-founder of Sei Labs, said in a statement. "Sei is designed to let apps and other projects scale in a way that no other blockchain can, while also maintaining a user-friendly experience. Sei’s mainnet ushers in a new generation of applications in web3 that enable the exchange of digital assets to scale to global adoption."

Sei has over 200 teams building on it and more than 7.5 million unique wallets, according to the press release. "Over 30 live applications are slated to launch with more to be released in the second half of 2023, including Sushiswap’s highly anticipated new decentralized perpetual futures exchange," Sei Labs added.

Sei is a Cosmos SDK-based proof-of-stake blockchain. In April 2023, Sei Labs raised $30 million in two strategic funding rounds from venture firms including Jump and Multicoin Capital.

The Sei airdrop

On Tuesday, the Sei Foundation announced an airdrop for whitelisted users who bridge qualifying assets into the Sei network.

Examples of assets that qualify are USDC, ETH, maticUSDC and bnbUSDT. Active users on Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain and Osmosis can partake.

To receive airdrop tokens wallets must be "mainnet-ready and connected to Pacific-1 Mainnet."