What is going on with SEI crypto token? Is it a scam?

A few days after its launch, the newest cryptocurrency project to trend on Crypto Twitter (X) has been deemed a “fiasco” amid massive frustration related to a promised airdrop of new tokens to investors who bridged Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Binance Smart Chain (BNB) to the Sei Network (SEI).

The company behind the project, Sei Labs, announced the mainnet launch on August 15, and one day later SEI registered over 3,000% value appreciation in 24 hours. Being listed in major exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, Bitget, and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN).

Besides the listings, the team promised to reward “pioneering users of blockchain technology from across many ecosystems”, in order to make “a truly cross-chain airdrop”, as posted. 

However, the lack of details on how the claiming process would work, caused frustration to arise when investors’ expectations weren’t fulfilled — facing a further announcement of a “warmup period”, before SEI tokens were really distributed.

Is SEI a scam?

A few enthusiasts are trying to understand what is happening with SEI. Sieve has given a few reasons why it has been called a scam (or a rug pull).

“The reason SEI launch is being called a scam is because the airdrop is a huge letdown. The Sei Network team also locked down their discord starting yesterday morning, on the day of a token launch. Never seen that happen before.”

— Sieve (@SieveIntel)

Some have called it the “Worst L1 Blockchain Airdrop distribution mechanism ever seen”. Also calling Sei Network the “first Meme Blockchain”. Listing Sei’s airdrop between a series of bad news for the week, calling it a “fiasco”, but not a scam.

What is Sei?

Sei is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to scale the trading capabilities of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) through the use of its matching engine and order front-run prevention solutions. Built on the Cosmos software development kit.

With regulators continuing to crack down on centralized exchanges, decentralized apps (dApps) “need to be ready to handle an increase in on-chain volume”, Sei Labs explained in the press release.

In this same press release, SEI claims to be “the fastest layer 1”, with a 500ms finality as exposed on the project’s official website, according to testnet results. Making it ten times faster than Solana’s time to finality of five seconds on average, according to Crypto Research, considered one of the fastest layer-1s side by side with Avalanche (AVAX), estimated to reach around 1.5 seconds to finality.

This would make Sei Network one of the fastest layer-1, if the results can be replicated on the production network. Although still loosing to faster networks like Nano (XNO), with a reported average of less than 400ms finality, by the independent network explorer, NanoLooker, on the mainnet.

SEI price analysis

SEI is changing hands for $0.1772 by press time, showing realized losses of 8.59% in the last 24 hours, with a market cap of $318.99 million, sitting among the top 100 cryptocurrencies according to CoinMarketCap.

The Sei Network is programmed to have a total supply of 10 billion SEI, of which only 1.8 billion (18%) are already circulating. This makes SEI’s fully diluted market cap to be over $1.77 billion in current prices.

Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.