Hassan Maishera
On Thursday, the Sei team announced via X that Sei Labs has introduced the Hermes protocol upgrade.
With Hermes, validators can vote for different proposals and still finalize the history they share. Agreement already present in their votes becomes useful progress, even when no single proposal wins enough votes. The end result is a consensus protocol that is exceptionally fast in both good cases and bad cases.
Hermes is a partially synchronous fast-path consensus protocol, built to bound tail latency. Like Minimmit or Alpenglow, Hermes runs in views, each with a leader, and requires at least 80% of votes to terminate a view.
Unlike Minimmit, Hermes does not require at least 80% matching votes (a quorum) to finalize a value, and instead allows finalization of a common prefix among a quorum of votes (if any).
The payoff is clear in the latest results. In the good case, testing 51 validators across 4 European regions, and a load of 100,000 txn/s, the median latency is just 68ms, with p95 at 101ms.
Sei is a blockchain designed for fast, cheap financial transactions, combining the network effects of Ethereum with the performance of Solana.
The blockchain has processed more than five billion transactions across more than 90 million wallets and has become the #1 EVM chain by number of active users. The team is backed by top investors such as Multicoin, Jump, Coinbase Ventures, and Circle Ventures – and includes talent from companies like Robinhood, Google, Coinbase, Databricks, Uber, and Goldman Sachs.
Sei is a high-speed Layer 1 blockchain tailored for the digital asset boom, from NFTs to DeFi. The blockchain intends to unlock a brand-new design space for consumer-facing applications.
Sei's security is anchored in a multifaceted approach that integrates advanced technology, stringent security protocols, and a commitment to transparent governance. At its core, Sei leverages a sector-specific Layer 1 blockchain architecture, designed specifically for trading, which inherently enhances its security profile by catering to the unique demands of decentralized exchanges (DEXes). This specialization allows Sei to offer unparalleled transaction speeds and reliability, crucial for DEX operations where even brief downtimes can have significant repercussions.
Its native coin, SEI is down 2.7% in the last 24 hours and is now trading at $0.07119 per coin.
