Inside Sei Network's Giga Upgrade and Its Race Toward 200,000 TPS

Sei Network is rebuilding its blockchain from the ground up to hit 200,000 transactions per second with finality under 400 milliseconds. The project, called Giga, is not one upgrade but three separate ones working together: a new consensus layer, a new execution engine, and a new storage system. Sei Labs published the public roadmap in late May 2026, and parts of it are already live on mainnet. For readers who know Sei only as a fast, trading-focused Layer 1, Giga marks a jump in ambition. The network's earlier throughput sat in the 5,000 to 12,500 TPS range. If Giga hits its target, that would be a 40 to 50-fold increase in raw capacity, using a metric Sei calls gigagas to measure computational throughput rather than transaction count alone. What Is the Giga Upgrade, Exactly? Giga is a multi-phase engineering program that touches three parts of the blockchain: how validators agree on transactions, how those transactions get executed, and how the resulting data gets stored. Sei Labs describes it as a full rebuild rather than a tuning pass on the existing system. Full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is preserved throughout, so developers building on Sei do not need to rewrite their smart contracts to benefit from the changes. The three components each have their own name: Autobahn handles consensus, the process validators use to agree on the order of transactions. Ares rebuilds the execution client, the software that actually runs transactions. Eidos rebuilds storage, the database layer that records and serves chain history. How Does Autobahn Reach 200,000 TPS? Most blockchains rely on a single block proposer at a time. One validator proposes a block, the network votes, and only then does the next validator get a turn. That sequential process creates a bottleneck no matter how fast the hardware is. Autobahn is a multi-proposer consensus protocol, meaning several validators can propose blocks at the same time instead of taking turns. Paired with asynchronous execution, which decouples transaction processing from the consensus layer so transactions don't have to wait for each other in strict sequence, this is the mechanism Sei Labs credits for the leap from thousands of TPS to a target of over 200,000. Sei has said an internal, geographically distributed devnet has already demonstrated 5 gigagas of throughput and TPS above 200,000 under controlled conditions, though the live mainnet has not yet reached those figures and real-world performance may differ from benchmark results. What Changed With the Ares and Eidos Rollout? Sei shipped the first concrete pieces of Giga through its v6.6 mainnet upgrade in August 2026, which brought Ares online as the default execution client and started the phased rollout of Eidos.