When the first stablecoin meets high-performance Layer 1: Why Sei stands out

On July 10, Circle officially announced that after mainstream ecosystems such as Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Arbitrum, native USDC and CCTP V2 have officially integrated log in to Sei. This not only means that Sei has become another "leading chain" in the USDC integration matrix, but also a positive recognition of its ecological strength and development potential.

What is CCTP V2? In one sentence, it is a new generation cross-chain transfer protocol created by Circle, focusing on "seamless cross-chain" and efficient one-stop capital flow. With CCTP V2, users and developers can safely and smoothly transfer native USDC across 13 mainstream public chains and 156 routes without the cumbersome bridging process, and without worrying about liquidity fragmentation and transaction fee losses. This experience is like freely moving US dollars in different cities, without a sense of boundaries or friction.

The significance of this integration goes far beyond just "adding a new chain." For a public chain, whether it can obtain native support for USDC has long been an important indicator of whether its ecosystem is active and whether real traffic is abundant. USDC itself is the largest regulated dollar stablecoin in the world, and every expansion by Circle is a deep recognition of the on-chain user base, capital volume, and developer ecosystem. Now, Sei has become one of the few chains with "native USDC support," which means it officially joins the "mainstream chain club." This not only signifies that more capital, users, and developers will flock to Sei, but it also heralds the beginning of a new round of ecological prosperity.

This is a bull market for stablecoins

When discussing native USDC and the enhancements of CCTP V2, we might as well broaden our perspective and observe how the overall industry trends guide this round of "stablecoin bull market."

Let's start with the capital market. Since last year, the news of Circle submitting its IPO application has continuously attracted industry attention, and its performance after going public has been remarkable.

On June 5, 2025, Circle officially logged in to the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol CRCL), with an issuance price of $31 per share. The closing price on the first day soared to $83.23, achieving an increase of 168.5%, and the market capitalization quickly surpassed $18 billion, making it one of the strongest IPOs in the past four years. After the initial surge, Circle's stock price continued to rise, with a cumulative increase of over 500% by mid-June. By early July, the stock price had reached nearly $300, and the market capitalization climbed to approximately $56 billion.

Following closely is the policy aspect; the passage of the U.S. "Stablecoin Bill" undoubtedly provides a "reassurance" for the entire industry. It is rare for the three major giants of the White House, Congress, and federal regulators to reach a consensus, acknowledging the monetary status of stablecoins and explicitly requiring a series of "high standards" such as 100% reserves, compliance review, and redeemability. This means that stablecoins are no longer "experimental products" in a gray area, but "official monetary instruments" protected by U.S. law and backed by the state. For developers, institutions, and funders, the realization of this policy dividend signifies that the era of compliance has truly arrived.

With the passage of the U.S. Stablecoin Act (GENIUS Act), major Wall Street banks are joining the stablecoin race. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley all expressed their intentions to enter the stablecoin space during their second-quarter earnings call.

In the past year, the growth rate of stablecoins has far exceeded that of most mainstream public chain native assets. Whether in terms of trading volume, payment settlement, or cross-border circulation, USDT and USDC have long occupied the top position of "on-chain dollars." Looking back at the ideal of "peer-to-peer electronic cash" in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, today's stablecoins are, in fact, much closer to this vision.

Therefore, whether a public chain has a mainstream native stablecoin has become a "barometer" for measuring the health of its ecosystem— the issuance and increase of stablecoins often indicates genuine user demand and capital inflow; conversely, once stablecoins are actively destroyed or withdrawn from a certain chain, it means that the chain's traffic is drying up and heading towards "silence."

Therefore, the native USDC and CCTP V2 have officially integrated to log in to Sei, which, from this perspective, is also an acknowledgment of Sei's steady growth.

The Steady Growth of Sei

On the emerging public chain Sei, the on-chain activity data has also been impressive over the past six months. From the beginning of 2025 to now, the TVL has skyrocketed from 208 million USD to 600 million USD, with an annual growth rate of 188%. The number of Dapps launched within the ecosystem has exceeded 200, the developer community remains active, and innovative projects are emerging one after another. The mainnet's performance will not only be based on "high-speed EVM compatibility" but will also soon welcome the "Giga upgrade," significantly enhancing its expansion capabilities. On-chain daily trading volume, active users, token prices, and other indicators are all on the rise, with nearly every data curve refreshing historical highs.

In the past year and a half, Sei's rapid growth in the on-chain ecosystem has been validated by multidimensional data curves.

The growth of Sei's TVL may also be attributed to Takara Lend and Yei Finance. Currently, Takara Lend's TVL has surpassed 100 million USD, with an annual interest rate of 15.64% for USDT and 14.79% for USDC. Takara Lend is evolving from a simple lending protocol into a programmable credit platform, building a "credit layer" for DeFi, allowing crypto assets to be used not only for investment but also to support real-world payments. Yei Finance is the largest lending project on the Sei chain, with a current TVL of 380 million USD, ranking first in the ecosystem.

Looking at the average daily DEX trading volume: Before July 2024, the daily trading volume on decentralized exchanges on Sei was mainly concentrated below 10 million USD, as the ecosystem was still in its infancy. Starting from September 2024, a wave of projects and users surged in, quickly pushing the average daily trading volume to over 100 million USD; since 2025, with the establishment of compliant capital channels such as USDC and CCTP, as well as the diversification of the AMM ecosystem—including concentrated liquidity, limit orders, and cross-chain trading functionalities, Sei DEX's daily trading volume has repeatedly reached peaks of 80 million to 100 million USD, reflecting a dual increase in market activity and user stickiness.

Finally, regarding the market cap trend: the Sei token has begun a sustained rebound from a market valuation of less than 300 million USD at the end of 2023. At the beginning of 2024, accompanied by the first round of ecological airdrops and the mainnet launch, the market cap quickly soared to 1.8 billion USD; although there was a phase of correction afterwards, it remained supported above 1 billion USD. In March 2025, with more institutional investors and compliant investment tools getting involved, the market cap climbed again to a peak of 2.8 billion USD, while recently it has also been oscillating upward in the range of 2 to 2.5 billion USD. This synchronous growth across the three curves of TVL, trading volume, and market cap fully demonstrates that Sei, as a high-performance Layer-1 public chain, is attracting multi-layer liquidity from retail to institutional investors, with a continuously expanding ecosystem and increasing value realization.

At the same time, Sei has also been selected by the Wyoming Stablecoin Committee as a candidate deployment chain for WYST (a US stablecoin backed by fiat currency). WYST plans to achieve cross-chain bridging with LayerZero, which means that in the future, more stablecoins backed by sovereign or institutional endorsements will also be prioritized for deployment on Sei.

In the RWA field, another heavyweight project has settled on Sei. On July 17, 2025, the RWA tokenization platform Ondo Finance announced that its flagship dollar yield token USDY (United States Dollar Yield) has officially logged in to the Sei network, becoming the first on-chain treasury asset deployed on this ultra-fast Layer-1 public chain. USDY is currently operating on multiple chains, with a TVL exceeding 680 million USD, providing approximately 4.25% annualized yield for global (excluding the United States) individual and institutional investors. This integration not only deeply combines the high-grade treasury yields with Sei's ability to process tens of thousands of transactions per second but also marks Sei's official assault on the institutional-level DeFi market.

Not only that, Sei is driving a fundamental technology revolution with the "Giga Upgrade" at its core. The latest released Giga white paper points out: self-developed high-throughput EVM client: achieving a processing capacity of billions of gas (Gigagas) per second through precompiled compilation, transaction dependency static analysis, and parallel execution; Autobahn multi-lane consensus: breaking through the traditional single proposer bottleneck, parallel packaging by multiple proposers, with the final confirmation time compressed to under 700 milliseconds; asynchronous state submission and efficient storage path: adopting asynchronous state root generation, write-ahead logging, and batch writing strategies, decoupling contract execution from state writing, significantly reducing latency.

During internal testing, the Sei team deployed a data network consisting of 40 validation nodes distributed across Singapore, Germany, Ohio, and Oregon, simulating real-world latency and bandwidth constraints. In this environment, Sei Giga has stably achieved a throughput capacity of 5 Gigagas/s, maintaining sub-second confirmations, representing a true "Web2 level on-chain performance."

These advancements – from financial protocols to technological foundations – not only enrich the ecological gameplay of Sei but also further enhance the platform's capabilities in credit, compliance, and cross-chain asset hosting. Whether it is TVL, trading volume, lending rates, or the compliant deployment and high-performance upgrades of stablecoins, Sei is accelerating simultaneously across multiple tracks, fully validating its growth momentum as a high-performance Layer-1 public chain.

USDC & CCTP V2 Integration is a Major Benefit for Sei

The integration of native USDC with CCTP V2 is not just a functional upgrade for Sei, but a "value leap" at the ecological level. Whether it is user experience, capital flow, or developer ecology and industry voice, all key variables will experience a qualitative change.

As mentioned earlier, for every on-chain user, native USDC itself signifies "confidence" and "efficiency". As the world's most mainstream compliant stablecoin, USDC has 100% reserves, 1:1 dollar redemption, and top-tier regulatory endorsement, allowing both ordinary users and institutions to enjoy the convenience of capital inflows and outflows without barriers. For professional funds, channels such as Circle Mint support high-volume deposits, withdrawals, and settlements, ensuring both compliance and liquidity. The addition of native USDC also allows Sei users to directly benefit from the security and convenience of Circle's global payment network. Whether they are DeFi players, project teams, or large fund managers, they can seamlessly switch between on-chain and off-chain US dollars.

But greater imagination comes from the multi-chain network of CCTP V2. CCTP V2 not only enables native USDC cross-chain transfers between Sei and 13 mainstream chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, but also covers up to 156 capital flow routes. For users, cross-chain transfers no longer require various "complicated bridging", no repeated exchanges, and no worries about liquidity layering and slippage, truly achieving "one-click switching, seamless experience".

For developers, CCTP V2 directly opens the door to the multi-chain world—you can create seamless cross-chain DEXs, cross-chain wallets, on-chain liquidity pools, GameFi, payment scenarios, RWAs, on-chain finance, and other new products based on Sei, allowing users to enjoy smooth USDC payments, exchanges, and asset transfers on any chain.

Sei can also become a "multichain stronghold" in the entire crypto world, not only accommodating the traffic from its own chain but also continuously attracting users, assets, and developers from outside chains such as Ethereum and Solana.

The era of USDC on Noble has become a thing of the past. With the arrival of native USDC, Circle and the Sei Foundation are working together to facilitate the orderly migration of liquidity from Noble's USDC to Sei's native USDC. This not only brings greater asset security and transparency but also significantly enhances compliance and the ability to interface with global DeFi and CeFi scenarios.

More importantly, Circle's "native ecosystem" effect will encourage more international funds, mainstream compliant users, and institutional players to prioritize Sei as their on-chain home. Every liquidity upgrade represents a leap in Sei's ecosystem credibility, scale, and brand strength.

Furthermore, Circle's integration has led to a reassessment of Sei's global influence and brand premium. In addition to the liquidity of stablecoins themselves, it also means that partners, Dapps, compliance institutions, and even traditional financial giants within the Circle ecosystem have the opportunity to join Sei, paving the way for new tracks such as on-chain dollar deposits and loans, RWA (on-chain assets), government bond issuance, and cross-border settlements. History has repeatedly shown that after the integration of native USDC on any mainstream public chain, the on-chain capital activity and ecological scale will welcome a new wave of explosion.

For everyone concerned about the future of Sei, this is not just a technological upgrade, but also an entrance to a new bull market era—on-chain funds, users, and innovations will be linked by USDC, bringing Sei to a whole new stage.

Is the TVL of the Sei ecosystem accelerating? Is the market capitalization and circulation of stablecoins expanding rapidly? Are on-chain innovative products and multi-chain scenarios ushering in a new round of concentrated explosion? These changes will directly determine Sei's position in the industry as the "next hotspot public chain."