Parallel Execution in Blockchain: Sei’s Unique Scalability Solution

Blockchain scalability has long been challenging, with most networks relying on sequential transaction execution. This approach ensures accuracy but limits transaction throughput, leading to congestion and high fees. 

Sei Network addresses this issue with its innovative parallel execution framework, which enhances scalability, reduces latency, and supports high-performance decentralized applications (dApps).

What is Parallelization in Blockchain?

Parallel execution in blockchain refers to processing multiple transactions simultaneously rather than sequentially. This optimizes resource utilization and improves network efficiency.

Traditional blockchains, including Ethereum, process transactions one by one to maintain determinism, leading to bottlenecks. Parallel execution addresses these limitations by increasing Transaction Processing Speed  (TPS), reducing latency, and enhancing overall scalability.

Why Is It Important?

A study by Sei Network reveals that approximately 64.85% of Ethereum transactions are independent and could be processed in parallel. If Ethereum implemented parallel execution, it could see significant performance gains.

Currently, Ethereum’s sequential execution ensures correctness but limits efficiency. Sei’s research highlights that 35.15% of transactions are dependent, meaning they must be processed in order due to shared state interactions. Strategies like Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) can be used to enable parallel execution. OCC assumes conflicts are rare, allowing simultaneous processing. If disputes arise, the system rolls back and re-executes only the affected transactions.

By leveraging parallel transaction processing, Ethereum and other blockchains could unlock improved scalability and lower transaction processing times, benefiting users and developers alike.

Rising Demand for High-Performance Blockchains

The demand for scalable blockchains is growing due to the increasing adoption of DeFi, gaming, and large-scale dApps. Networks capable of parallelizing execution can better accommodate high transaction volumes and complex applications, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Approaches of Implementing Parallel Execution

Traditional blockchains execute transactions sequentially, limiting scalability. Sei and other advanced blockchains implement parallel execution through different methods:

• State Access Parallelization. Pre-analyzes transactions to detect dependencies. Used by Solana and Sui, it improves execution efficiency but adds complexity.
• Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC). Sei’s approach runs transactions in parallel, checking for conflicts after execution. Conflicting transactions are re-executed, minimizing overhead.
• Sharding. Divides blockchain state into independent shards, allowing parallel execution. Used by Ethereum 2.0 (future) and NEAR, but adds cross-shard complexity.

Why Sei’s Approach Works?

Research shows 64.85% of Ethereum transactions can be parallelized, making OCC highly effective. Sei’s conflict detection minimizes retries, ensuring high throughput without added complexity for developers. Sei is an ideal blockchain for DeFi, gaming, and large-scale applications.

Sei’s Parallel Stack: A Game Changer

Sei Network is redefining the performance of Layer 2 blockchains through its innovative Parallel Stack, an open-source framework designed to maximize scalability and throughput. While Sei V2 brings parallel execution to the EVM, the Parallel Stack extends these benefits to Layer 2 solutions, ensuring that developers can build faster and more efficient rollups with minimal friction.

The Problem it Solves

Sei Labs follows a “developer-first” approach, recognizing the dominance of the EVM among blockchain developers — nearly 90% of them work on at least one EVM-based chain. However, despite the widespread adoption of Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions, significant limitations persist:

• Throughput constraints: Existing rollups are often bottlenecked by single-threaded execution, limiting transaction speed.
• Restricted design space: Developers face trade-offs between decentralization, cost, and performance, preventing full-scale innovation.
• Rising demand: With DeFi, gaming, and complex dApps requiring increasingly higher performance, standard Layer 2 solutions struggle to keep up.

While Layer 2 networks offer cheaper transactions than Ethereum mainnet, the Parallel Stack takes scalability even further by leveraging parallel execution, enabling more efficient computation and drastically improving blockchain performance.

How It Works

The Parallel Stack is an open-source framework tailored for building Layer 2s and rollups that harness parallel processing. It is based on insights gained from developing Sei V2.

Key innovations of the Parallel Stack include:

• Parallelized Virtual Machine. Unlike traditional single-threaded EVM chains, the Parallel Stack allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously, reducing congestion and improving speed.
• Optimized State Partitioning. The blockchain state is intelligently divided into independent segments to allow concurrent execution.
• Validator-Supported Sequencing. Developers can leverage Sei’s validator set for transaction sequencing, ensuring security and decentralization.
• Cost Efficiency. The Parallel Stack significantly lowers transaction costs for users and developers by utilizing modern hardware optimizations.

As a fully open-source initiative, the Parallel Stack empowers builders in the Ethereum ecosystem with unparalleled customization capabilities, while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum’s robust security features or any chosen data availability layer.

The Future of Layer 2 with the Parallel Stack

Sei Labs envisions a future where all Ethereum Layer 2 solutions leverage parallel execution for higher efficiency, better user experience, and greater developer design space. The goal is establishing the Parallel Stack as the industry standard for launching next-generation rollups, marking a major leap in Ethereum scalability.

By providing this technology as a public good, Sei Labs ensures that developers have the tools they need to innovate, optimize, and scale decentralized applications without compromise. Sei Network has introduced a groundbreaking parallel execution framework that optimizes blockchain scalability. Sei’s Parallel Stack is designed to handle large transaction volumes efficiently while ensuring decentralization and low latency.

Sei’s Vision for 2025: Giga and Beyond

Sei is pushing blockchain scalability forward with the Giga Initiative, targeting a 50x performance boost for the EVM. The aim is to achieve 5 gigagas per second, providing the computational power to match web2 applications while maintaining full Ethereum compatibility.

Scaling Beyond Current Limits

While widely adopted, the EVM was not built for high-throughput applications. Most blockchains process around 100 transactions per second, severely limiting dApp functionality. Sei addresses this by redesigning execution, consensus, and storage for massive parallelization and efficiency gains.

Sei’s scaling strategy revolves around three critical upgrades:

• Optimized Execution. A next-gen EVM client with ahead-of-time compilation, smart dependency tracking, and parallelized transaction execution.
• Faster Consensus. Decoupled transaction ordering, multiple concurrent proposers, and improved data propagation to reduce network latency.
• Enhanced Storage. Asynchronous state updates, optimized key-value storage, and efficient disk writes for handling large-scale data loads.

Beyond performance, Sei is committed to building a developer-first ecosystem, providing resources for builders through grants, hackathons, and governance participation. By setting new standards in scalability and efficiency, Sei is shaping the future of high-performance blockchain applications.

Conclusion

Sei Network is revolutionizing blockchain scalability with its cutting-edge parallel execution model. By leveraging an optimized transaction processing system and a unique consensus mechanism, Sei significantly boosts throughput while maintaining low latency and decentralization.

As Sei continues to innovate and refine its architecture, it stands as a benchmark for the future of high-performance blockchains. Parallel execution is set to redefine blockchain capabilities, and Sei is leading the way in making this vision a reality.