Podcast: The Round Trip

Compiled & edited by: Yuliya, PANews

Having witnessed the GameStop short squeeze and seen Robinhood "pull the plug" to forcibly end the retail investor frenzy, this "crash" moment in traditional finance actually gave birth to Sei, the world's fastest public blockchain aimed at replacing Nasdaq.

In the new Founder's Talk series "The Round Trip," co-produced by PANews and Web3.com Ventures, Sei founder Jay Jog not only provides a hardcore breakdown of how parallel EVM achieves a 50x performance leap, but also exclusively reveals the institutional funding secrets behind billions of dollars in TVL and the new track of AI Agent payments, giving you a glimpse into the real landscape of a "decentralized Wall Street."

From Robinhood to Cryptocurrency: The Breakdown of Traditional Finance and the Birth of Sei

PANews: Welcome Jay to Round Trip! So far, what are your impressions of Hong Kong? How about we start by talking about your personal journey—how did you get to where you are today? And what projects are you currently working on?

Jay Jog: Thank you for the invitation! This is my first time in Hong Kong since 2018, and the city is just as wonderful as I remember, or even better.

Regarding my background, I majored in Computer Science in college and joined the US brokerage platform Robinhood after graduation. Its most famous incident was the GameStop short squeeze. At that time, a large number of ordinary investors, driven by genuine optimism or a certain "meme-like" price movement, bought over a dozen stocks, including GameStop and AMC, known as "meme stocks," causing their prices to soar. Wall Street hedge funds, seeing this trend, attempted to short these stocks. The short-selling mechanism involves borrowing shares to sell and then buying them back to return them. However, as the stock prices rose sharply, short sellers continuously lost money and were forced to liquidate their positions, triggering a massive "short squeeze" that further pushed up stock prices. During that period in 2021, almost all retail investors made a lot of money from this.

But then one day, Robinhood, the brokerage firm I worked for, suddenly shut down the buy function. This meant no one could continue buying the rising stocks , essentially ending that price trend. The entire nation was shocked and furious, because what was supposed to be a moment when a "small person" had finally triumphed over Wall Street was instead effectively shut down by Wall Street itself. As an employee, I felt terrible. Friends often questioned me as if I were the company itself: "Why can't I trade now?" "Why am I losing money?" But I couldn't do anything about it; I had absolutely no control over the situation.

This experience truly made me realize how "failed" the current financial system is. The root cause lies in the T+2 settlement mechanism: Robinhood had to provide up to $3 billion in collateral to a third-party clearinghouse to allow users to continue trading, but the company didn't have that kind of money. This is the initial lesson: the traditional financial system has structural problems. If you want to build a truly "internet-native" financial system, you need "internet-native" financial infrastructure. This is why I believe blockchain is the ideal platform to support all of this, and this was essentially our initial motivation for founding Sei.

Breaking Through EVM Performance Bottlenecks: The Rise and Ecosystem Explosion of Parallel EVMs

PANews: With this motivation, how did you begin to build Sei?

Jay Jog: We started development in 2021, initially launching Sei V1 based on the Cosmos architecture, and then launched the first version of the mainnet in August 2023. Cosmos does have a large developer community, but we found that you also have to support EVM smart contracts (usually written in Solidity and compiled into EVM bytecode). If you don't support EVM, it's very difficult to build a truly large-scale, vibrant developer ecosystem.

So we began to seriously consider supporting the EVM, while also studying its limitations. One of the most prominent issues was the very limited throughput supported by the Ethereum mainnet and its various rollups, roughly only 50 transactions per second. For example, if you wanted to build an order book-based exchange like Nasdaq, you would need to support approximately 20,000 transactions per second (TPS). This created a complete disconnect: a huge gap between what can be done on-chain and the performance of the real world off-chain. We realized this was an opportunity to support this level of performance while still maintaining decentralization. This is the initial motivation behind our creation of the Parallel EVM.

PANews: Parallel EVM generated a huge buzz after its official launch on the mainnet in July 2024. You could say you started this narrative, right?

Jay Jog: Yes, I think we were indeed the team that first proposed this narrative, and the first to actually implement it on the mainnet. This also led to many application scenarios initially appearing only on our chain, followed by a significant increase in on-chain activity. Currently, more than 5 billion transactions have occurred on the mainnet, with approximately 100 million unique wallet addresses conducting transactions on the chain, and more than 1 million daily active users.

This activity further boosted TVL within the ecosystem, with our peak TVL reaching approximately $18 billion, a very substantial figure across the entire ecosystem.

The underlying logic for institutional entry: traffic, distribution, and killer apps.

PANews: Such high data has indeed attracted institutional funds to enter the market. When these institutional investors choose between different blockchains, what do they value most? Is it traffic, brand, or the underlying technology?

Jay Jog: In the past year, we've had five large institutional funds (including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, Apollo, and Laser) launch fund products on our chain. A few weeks ago, Ondo also launched USDY on our chain. We're now starting to see significant institutional adoption taking hold.

Frankly speaking, institutions aren't that concerned with the underlying technology itself. They're more interested in your user base and whether your distribution channels are well-established . This is why ecosystems like Ethereum and Solana naturally attract more institutions—because they already have the largest user base and mature distribution networks.

From a broader perspective, the value of blockchain performance lies primarily in empowering developers. If you can support extremely high throughput, you open up new design space for developers, allowing them to build entirely new application types. If you can create a "killer app" that other ecosystems simply cannot achieve, it will naturally attract more users, and consequently, more institutions will become more interested in this ecosystem. In the crypto space, "excitement" usually comes from two things: either a new source of revenue emerges that allows users to earn money, or a particular application scenario is inherently interesting and worth participating in. As long as either one is met, users will start transacting on the blockchain, which is key to attracting and triggering the "flywheel effect."

The Entrepreneurial Journey Through Bull and Bear Markets: Maintaining Focus and Resilience in Adversity

PANews: I'd like to delve deeper into your personal experience. Giving up a comfortable, high-paying, and stable job at Robinhood to start your own crypto business, were there moments in the past few years when you felt, "This isn't what I wanted"? Could you share some of those challenging moments that made you stronger?

Jay Jog: I think we were going against the grain from the very beginning. We started building the project in 2021, but our first funding round came almost exactly after Terra crashed. Terra's market value of about $50 billion evaporated in a week, and just three weeks after that, we were raising funds as a new team. You can imagine, most VCs were taking a wait-and-see approach at that time.

That was arguably our first real experience of the crypto funding environment. But when you launch a project in a bear market, especially after a near-apocalyptic crash, you become incredibly frugal and pragmatic, valuing your resources highly and keeping your team as lean as possible. This makes you very self-sufficient and gives you a clear direction. In a bull market, you'd be faced with 10 different development paths vying for your attention; in a bear market, these distractions are virtually nonexistent, allowing you to focus on one thing and perfect it.

Overall, I'm very glad I embarked on this journey; the project has been far more successful than I initially envisioned. Of course, there have been many lows, and whenever a bear market arrives, the entire industry's morale declines and confidence falters. For example, as we were recording this podcast, many influential people left the industry in the past two weeks, and the price of Bitcoin recently fell to a temporary low of around $59,000.

PANews: In recent weeks, we've seen many veteran players liquidate their positions and exit, even questioning the scalability of crypto finance and whether everything we've built is meaningless. Given this sentiment, why are you still 100% optimistic about the future?

Jay Jog: The crypto industry is an extremely resilient industry. The current situation is very interesting: on the one hand, the industry is making great progress , for example, the US government is pushing for legislation to give stablecoins legal status and establish a clear regulatory framework, and institutions are launching stablecoins and fund products on a large scale; but on the other hand, the price of Bitcoin is falling .

But one thing is very clear to me: as long as there is genuine growth and real adoption, the short-term volatility brought about by the bear market will dissipate in the long run. As long as you have enough faith in your project, the bear market is often the best time to enter the market. From a developer's perspective, it is a good time to build truly substantial applications and achieve real product-market fit (PMF); from an investor's perspective, it is also a good time to make high-conviction investments and allocate to quality assets (such as Bitcoin, which is currently at a discount). Therefore, I remain very optimistic about the future of the entire crypto industry.

Building a “Decentralized Wall Street”: Sei Giga, Permissionless Assets, and Internal Incubation

PANews: In your opinion, what else needs to be built to lay the foundation for the next bull market? What role does Sei play in this?

Jay Jog: Our vision is to build a “decentralized Wall Street.” From our perspective, a bear market presents an excellent opportunity to complete several key construction projects. There are three main core aspects:

• The first core element is the underlying L1 protocol itself . We are developing Sei Giga, which will help us achieve approximately 50x performance improvement. Compared to any other blockchain protocol on the market, this is an astonishing leap forward, making it possible to build Nasdaq-level systems on-chain (something currently difficult to achieve with existing public blockchain architectures). There are many interesting technologies behind this, such as multi-concurrent block production mechanisms and related incentive designs.
• The second level is institutional adoption. We've already started seeing assets and funds like USDY launched, and the next step is to make these assets as "permissionless" as possible. Currently, many assets are "permissioned," meaning they cannot be freely traded on-chain after issuance. Once permissionless access is achieved, these assets can truly be used in DeFi scenarios, such as in lending markets and other applications, which will be very exciting.
• The third point, which is what I most hope to see, is the emergence of more killer applications within our ecosystem. Over the past few years, we've observed two main paths to building killer applications. The first is to reach out to as many entrepreneurs as possible and persuade them to join, but this is often ineffective because truly successful founders typically choose top-tier ecosystems with the largest user base (such as Solana, Base, or Ethereum)—a classic "chicken or egg" problem. The second approach is more effective: actively incubating projects and truly making them work within our own ecosystem. Traditional "standard methods" (such as hosting hackathons and builder houses) will be less effective by 2026. We're already on the internal incubation path, and I believe other ecosystems will gradually follow suit.

PANews: As a retail investor, I would like to ask, among the projects incubated within your ecosystem, what are some unique features of Sei? After all, Solana and other chains also emphasize high performance, so what are the differences?

Jay Jog: A key point is that once Sei Giga is launched, all applications related to the Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) will only be possible on our chain. If you want to build a system similar to Nasdaq, it requires approximately 20,000 TPS, which is practically impossible on existing public chains. And Nasdaq only accounts for about 10% of global securities trading volume. Therefore, if you want securities trading to truly be on-chain, it's currently almost impossible on other chains, but Sei Giga will unlock this capability. I believe that more financial applications, especially trading scenarios, will be the most promising area.

Advice for ordinary investors: Establish core beliefs and avoid blindly following the crowd.

PANews: I believe you've experienced multiple bull and bear cycles. I personally believe we're in a supercycle, but market sentiment is truly terrible. As an investor in this field, how would you advise ordinary investors to weather a bear market?

Jay Jog: That's an interesting question. I first entered the crypto market in 2017, experiencing the frenzy at the end of 2017, followed by a significant cooling in 2018 and especially 2019. Ironically, I used my Bitcoin to gamble on poker websites and lost it all, so I strongly advise against doing that . Then I experienced the bear markets of 2020 and 2023 after the FTX crash.

The most important advice I can give is this: you must maintain a firm belief in your original reasons for getting involved in the crypto industry . Many people don't actually have a real belief in crypto; they just get in because their friends are doing it or because the industry is popular.

You need to establish a core logic to understand why you believe in crypto . Once you have this core understanding, whether you're a builder or an investor, all your decisions during a bear market will be much more composed. But if you simply find crypto "exciting," it often won't end well. Therefore, I strongly recommend that anyone experiencing a bear market deeply consider why you truly believe in crypto.

Breaking the myth of technological materialism: The true moat of an ecosystem lies in its users and applications.

PANews: By 2026, what misunderstandings do you think the market still has about Sei? How would you correct these perceptions?

Jay Jog: The biggest misconception is that people think we only focus on the technology itself and are just frantically improving performance.

We certainly value continuous technological optimization and improving chain performance. However, we also understand that the value of technology has its limits. After a certain stage, what truly determines the success of an ecosystem is actual user growth, real traction, and killer applications, rather than TPS (transactions per second) or final confirmation time. This is why we prioritize incubating projects, as it is the most efficient and direct way to enhance the overall strength of the ecosystem.

Advice for Asian developers in 2026: Deepen your involvement in financial scenarios and embrace AI Agent payments.

PANews: One last follow-up question, what advice would you give to Asian developers in 2026? What should they focus on when building applications?

Jay Jog: I think there are two broader trends right now:

• The first is that finance is gradually converging into a core application scenario for crypto . Of course, many other areas are being experimented with on-chain, such as blockchain games and social networking, but we're beginning to see that even in games, social networking, and various other crypto use cases, the truly effective implementations are often the finance-related parts, which are best suited for on-chain execution. Other modules can be built off-chain and then brought on-chain through state commitments or proof mechanisms. Therefore, I believe we should further delve into financial use cases and consider how to play a more important role within them.
• The second area that will see increasing growth is AI , especially with the emergence of more and more AI agents (such as products like Multbot). Users can run their own agents and instruct them to perform tasks. Agents are a form of activity native to the internet, and for this form, using an internet-native currency is the most logical approach. "Agent payments" will become a much larger trend. Protocols like Coinbase's x402 are being created, and we have actually played a significant role in helping them launch and becoming one of their first ecosystem drivers. Therefore, I believe that "Agent payments" are definitely a new direction worth exploring, especially suitable for startups.