Sei Network scored a major institutional win this week as Ondo Finance deployed USDY—the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury product by total value locked—on the high-throughput chain. The launch coincides with Sei hitting record engagement metrics and a governance-approved upgrade that kicks off the network’s transition to 200,000 TPS.

SEI traded at $0.29 on February 2, up 3.25% over 24 hours, with market cap sitting at $1.39 billion.

Treasury Yields Meet Real-Time Settlement

USDY’s deployment brings institutional-grade yield infrastructure to Sei’s execution environment. Unlike stablecoins that simply maintain a dollar peg, USDY passes through yield from underlying short-term Treasuries to holders—a product category that’s seen explosive growth as Ondo’s TVL recently expanded to $2.5 billion across chains.

The Sei ecosystem didn’t wait around. Within hours of launch, USDY went live across multiple DeFi verticals: swaps on Saphyre (formerly DragonSwap), lending markets on Takara Lend and Yei Finance, and cross-chain bridging through LayerZero. That’s unusual speed for RWA integrations, which typically require weeks of liquidity bootstrapping.

Network Metrics Flash Green

Token Relations data shows Sei hit 1.2 million daily active addresses last week—an all-time high. More interesting: returning users reached 2.2 million, nearly double the daily active count. That ratio suggests sticky usage patterns rather than airdrop farming or one-time interactions.

The engagement spike appears driven by gaming and AI applications. Match Fighters and Kindred AI—which just listed its KIN token on Binance Alpha—are generating the session-based activity that keeps users coming back multiple times daily.

Infrastructure Upgrades Incoming

Governance passed the v6.3 upgrade proposal this week, scheduled to go live next week. It’s the first fork on the roadmap to “Sei Giga”—the network’s target state of 200,000 TPS with 400ms block times.

The upgrade adds an EVM-only staking precompile and clears technical debt accumulated during Sei’s hybrid architecture phase. Future releases will complete the EVM transition by removing hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code.

Circle also activated crosschain forwarding for CCTP on Sei mainnet. The managed service handles destination-chain execution automatically, eliminating the need for developers to maintain multichain infrastructure or manage gas on receiving networks.

What Traders Should Watch

The combination of RWA infrastructure, record user growth, and imminent performance upgrades creates a catalyst stack worth monitoring. The v6.3 fork next week could serve as a technical validation event, while USDY liquidity depth across Sei’s DeFi protocols will indicate whether institutional capital follows the integration.

Kindred AI’s Binance Alpha listing also opens a new exposure vector—consumer AI applications built on Sei now have direct CEX accessibility, potentially driving additional network activity.

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