Only 15.2 million people worldwide owned cryptocurrency in July 2017. Now, that number has jumped to 82 million crypto owners, according to Statista, and other estimates place it as high as 300 million. Only 20 percent of individuals report owning any crypto between June and December 2021, and 61 percent of that figure are millennials earning over $100,000 a year, according to Morning Consult.

There are many barriers to entry to the world of crypto ownership, including psychological factors in switching to new financial platforms, but one major drawback has been the lack of interoperability and liquidity in decentralized finance.

“In terms of liquidity, decentralized finance is still tiny compared to traditional asset classes. Decentralized finance is still in its nascent stages, the infrastructure and tooling for composability across ecosystems is getting built out,” said Dan Edlebeck, co-founder of Sei Network.

Since the order book is kept on-chain, which is completely stored on the blockchain, Sei Network can optimize for performance and speed. Many protocols have been traditionally challenged by pricing errors or delays: when a protocol uses an off-chain pricing oracle, there are delays between the acquisition of trading information and the protocol, leading to failing nodes.

Moreover, the Sei Network is a permissioned blockchain, meaning that projects must go through some degree of vetting to get listed. Although that limits the number of projects on the blockchain, it also helps ensure that a minimum quality threshold is met for larger investors.

Because the Sei Network is built on the Cosmos network, each blockchain operates independently — a market advantage. Traditionally, congestion and problems on a layer-1 blockchain can have ripple effects for every other project on it, like the blockchain protocol Serum encountering delays when the Solana blockchain was down. “Operating on a sovereign, purpose-built blockchain, decentralized finance applications built on Sei receive the security and resiliency of the Cosmos and Tendermint Core infrastructure, interoperability and composability of Inter‑Blockchain Communication Protocol, and the reliability and throughput of the Sei blockchain,” Edlebeck said.

Sei Network is working to build exactly that architecture. Launched as a layer-1, meaning its blockchains can validate transactions without another network, and built on the Cosmos SDK, the most used framework for blockchains, Sei Network has an order book as the base layer of the blockchain. Order books list the number of shares being bid on or offered at different price points, as well as identify the entities behind buying and sell orders, creating the transparency and credibility needed for larger institutional investors to buy and sell. Order books have become the gold standard to organize and structure bids and asks since Nasdaq adopted electronic order books thirty years ago.

Sei Network provides an alternative to automated market makers. “For larger assets, you need to have an on-chain order book so that there is a market and information for options trading,” Edlebeck said.

Sei Network’s lead engineer, Jay Jog, is formerly of Robinhood, other executives have Goldman Sachs backgrounds, and Edlebeck is a household name in the Cosmos ecosystem, having launched Sentinel and Exidio, two high-profile decentralized finance projects with significant recent attention. The Sei Network team consists of leaders that institutional players have yet to see — and players that Sei hopes to entice, along with all of those developer-friendly projects. Sei lovingly refers to its emerging community as “Seilors,” as seen in clever aquatic branding content which plays with themes of depth and liquidity.

It will still take some time until larger, publicly-traded companies get more involved in decentralized finance, especially because of the know-your-customer rules and guidelines. But solutions are emerging that provide a balance between complete anonymity and the release of all personal identifiable information.