Podcast: The Round Trip
Edited & Organized by Yuliya, PANews
Having experienced the GameStop short squeeze battle firsthand, watching Robinhood cut off buying and forcibly end retail traders’ celebration, this moment of traditional finance “crashing” directly led to the creation of Sei, the world’s fastest public chain aiming to replace Nasdaq.
In the new series Founder’s Talk of “The Round Trip,” produced jointly by PANews and Web3.com Ventures, Sei founder Jay Jog not only provides an in-depth analysis of how parallel EVM achieves 50x performance leaps but also reveals the institutional funding secrets behind the billions in TVL and the new AI Agent payment track, giving you a glimpse of the real picture of “decentralized Wall Street.”
From Robinhood to Cryptocurrency: The Breakup of Traditional Finance and the Birth of Sei
PANews: Welcome Jay to “Round Trip”! So far, how has your experience been in Hong Kong? Let’s start with your personal journey—how did you get to where you are today? And what projects are you working on recently?
Jay Jog: Thanks for having me! This is my first time in Hong Kong since 2018, and the city is just as vibrant as I remember, even better.
Regarding my background, I majored in Computer Science in college, then joined Robinhood, a US brokerage platform. Its most famous incident was the GameStop squeeze. At that time, many retail investors, driven by genuine optimism or meme-driven price trends, bought stocks like GameStop and AMC, called “meme stocks,” causing their prices to soar. Wall Street hedge funds saw this and tried to short these stocks. Shorting involves borrowing shares to sell them and buying back later. As prices skyrocketed, short sellers kept losing money and were forced to cover, causing a massive short squeeze that pushed prices even higher. In 2021, almost all retail investors made a lot of money from this.
But suddenly, the broker I worked for, Robinhood, directly shut down buy orders, meaning no one could buy those rising stocks anymore—which essentially ended that price rally. The whole US was shocked and furious because it was supposed to be a “little guy” finally beating Wall Street, but it was shut down by Wall Street’s intervention. As an employee, I felt terrible. Friends often questioned me, asking, “Why can’t I trade now?” “Why am I losing money?” but I had no control over the situation.
This event made me realize how “broken” 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 third-party clearinghouses to keep trading, but the company didn’t have that money. That was the initial inspiration: the traditional financial system has structural issues. If you want to build a truly “internet-native” financial system, you need “internet-native” financial infrastructure. That’s why I believe blockchain is the ideal platform for this, and it was the fundamental motivation behind founding Sei.
Breaking Through EVM Performance Bottlenecks: The Rise of Parallel EVM and Ecosystem Explosion
PANews: After this motivation, how did you start building Sei?
Jay Jog: We began development in 2021, initially launching Sei V1 based on Cosmos architecture, and went live with the first mainnet version in August 2023. Cosmos has a large developer community, but we found that supporting EVM smart contracts (usually written in Solidity and compiled into EVM bytecode) was essential. Without EVM support, it’s hard to build a large, vibrant developer ecosystem.
So we seriously considered supporting EVM and also studied its limitations. The biggest issue is that Ethereum mainnet and its rollups support only about 50 transactions per second (TPS). For example, if you want to build an order book-based exchange like Nasdaq, you’d need around 20,000 TPS. This creates a huge gap: what can be done on-chain versus the real-world performance off-chain. We saw an opportunity to support this level of performance while maintaining decentralization. That’s why we developed and launched parallel EVM.
PANews: After the parallel EVM officially launched on mainnet in July 2024, it caused a huge wave. Would you say this narrative was pioneered by you?
Jay Jog: Yes, I believe we were the first to propose this narrative and the first to implement it on mainnet. It also spurred many applications initially only on our chain, leading to a significant increase in on-chain activity. Currently, over 5 billion transactions have occurred on the mainnet, with about 100 million unique wallet addresses involved, and daily active users exceeding 1 million.
This activity further boosted TVL within the ecosystem, reaching a peak of around $18 billion, which is a very impressive figure.
The Underlying Logic of Institutional Entry: Traffic, Distribution, and Killer Apps
PANews: Such high activity naturally attracted institutional funds. When these institutional allocators choose between different blockchains, what do they prioritize? Traffic, branding, or underlying technology?
Jay Jog: Over the past year, five major institutional funds (including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, Apollo, and Laser) have issued fund products on our chain. Recently, Ondo also launched USDY on our chain. We’re now seeing a lot of institutional adoption.
Honestly, institutions don’t care that much about the underlying technology itself. They care more about whether you have a solid user base and distribution channels. That’s why ecosystems like Ethereum and Solana naturally attract institutions—they already have the largest user bases and mature distribution networks.
From a macro perspective, the value of blockchain performance lies in empowering developers. If you can support very high throughput, you open new design spaces for developers to create innovative applications. If you can build “killer apps” that other ecosystems can’t, it will naturally attract more users and more institutional interest. In crypto, the “excitement” usually comes from either a new revenue source that allows users to profit or a very interesting application scenario worth participating in. Meeting either criterion draws users on-chain, creating a flywheel effect.
The Entrepreneurial Journey Through Bull and Bear Markets: Staying Focused and Resilient in Adversity
PANews: I want to revisit your personal story. Quitting a comfortable, high-paying, stable job at Robinhood to start a crypto venture—have there been moments over the past few years when you thought, “This isn’t what I want”? Can you share some tough times that made you stronger?
Jay Jog: I think we’ve been fighting headwinds from the start. We began building in 2021, but our first funding round happened right after the Terra collapse. Terra’s $50 billion market cap evaporated in a week, and just three weeks later, we, as a new team, went to raise funds. You can imagine most VCs were cautious or hesitant.
That was our first real experience in crypto fundraising. But starting a project during a bear market, especially after a “doomsday” crash, makes you very frugal, pragmatic, and resourceful. It forces you to be self-sufficient and clear about your direction. In a bull market, you might be pulled in ten different directions; in a bear market, distractions are minimal, and you can focus intensely on one thing and do it well.
Overall, I’m very grateful to have embarked on this journey. The project has exceeded my initial expectations. Of course, there have been lows—every bear market, industry morale dips, confidence wanes. For example, as we record this podcast, the past two weeks saw many influential figures leave the industry, and Bitcoin recently dipped to around $59,000.
PANews: Recently, many veteran players have exited, even questioning whether crypto finance can scale or if everything we built is meaningless. Why are you still 100% optimistic about the future?
Jay Jog: The crypto industry is incredibly resilient. The current situation is interesting: on one hand, the industry is making huge progress—for example, the US is pushing legislation to legitimize stablecoins and establish clear regulations; institutions are launching stablecoins and fund products at scale. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s price is falling.
But one thing is very clear to me: as long as there is real growth and adoption, short-term fluctuations caused by bear markets will eventually fade. If you believe strongly in your project, bear markets can be the best entry points. From a builder’s perspective, it’s the perfect time to develop meaningful applications and achieve true product-market fit (PMF). From an investor’s view, it’s a good time for high-conviction investments and to allocate to quality assets (like Bitcoin at a discount). So I remain very optimistic about the future of crypto.
Building a “Decentralized Wall Street”: Sei Giga, Permissionless Assets, and Internal Incubation
PANews: What else needs to be built to lay the foundation for the next bull run? What role does Sei play?
Jay Jog: Our vision is to build a “decentralized Wall Street.” From our perspective, bear markets are the perfect opportunity to complete key infrastructure projects. There are three core areas:
- First is the underlying Layer 1 protocol itself. We are developing Sei Giga, which will help us achieve about 50x performance improvement. Compared to other blockchain protocols on the market, this is an extraordinary leap, enabling Nasdaq-level systems to be built on-chain (which is very difficult with current public chains). It involves many interesting technologies, such as multi-concurrent block production and related incentive designs.
- Second is institutional adoption. We’ve already seen assets like USDY and fund products go live. The next step is to make these assets truly permissionless. Currently, many assets are permissioned—once issued, they cannot be freely traded on-chain. Once permissionless, these assets can be used in DeFi scenarios, like lending markets, which will be very exciting.
- Third, and what I most hope to see, is more killer apps landing in our ecosystem. Over the past few years, we’ve observed two main paths to building killer apps. One is to persuade many entrepreneurs to join, but this often has limited effect because top founders tend to prefer ecosystems with the most users (like Solana, Base, or Ethereum)—a classic chicken-and-egg problem. The more effective approach is to incubate projects internally and grow them within our ecosystem. Traditional methods (hackathons, builder houses) are less effective by 2026; we are already pursuing internal incubation, and I believe other ecosystems will follow suit.
PANews: As a retail investor, I’d like to ask: among the projects incubated within your ecosystem, what features are unique to Sei? Since chains like Solana also emphasize high performance, what’s the difference?
Jay Jog: A key point is that once Sei Giga is live, all applications related to central limit order books (CLOB) will only be possible on our chain. To build a Nasdaq-like system, you need around 20,000 TPS, which is nearly impossible on existing public chains. Nasdaq accounts for only about 10% of global securities trading volume. So, if you want real on-chain securities trading, other chains currently can’t support it, but Sei Giga will unlock this capability. I believe many financial applications, especially trading scenarios, will be the most promising directions.
Advice for Ordinary Investors: Build Core Convictions and Avoid Blind Following
PANews: I believe you’ve gone through multiple bull and bear cycles. I personally think we’re in a super cycle, but market sentiment is really bad. As an industry investor, how would you advise ordinary investors to get through the bear market?
Jay Jog: That’s a very interesting question. I first entered crypto in 2017, experienced the frenzy at the end of 2017, then the market cooled in 2018 and especially in 2019. Ironically, I once bet all my Bitcoin on a poker site and lost everything, so I strongly advise against doing that. I also went through the 2020 bear market and the FTX collapse in 2023.
The most important advice I can give is: You must stay firm in your original purpose for participating in crypto. Many people are in it just because friends are doing it or because of hype, not genuine belief.
You need to develop a core logic—understand why you believe in crypto. Once you have this core conviction, all your decisions during bear markets—whether building or investing—will be more confident. But if you only think crypto is “exciting,” it usually leads to poor outcomes. So I strongly recommend that anyone going through a bear market deeply reflect on why they truly believe in crypto.
Breaking the Myth of Tech-Only Focus: The Ecosystem’s True Moat Lies in Users and Applications
PANews: Looking ahead to 2026, what misconceptions do you think the market still has about Sei? How would you correct them?
Jay Jog: The biggest misconception is that people think we only focus on technology itself, just relentlessly improving performance.
Of course, we value continuous technological optimization and performance enhancement. But we also understand that technology’s value has limits. Beyond a certain point, the real determinants of ecosystem success are user growth, genuine traction, and killer apps—not TPS numbers or final confirmation times. That’s why we prioritize incubating projects, as it’s the most efficient and direct way to strengthen the ecosystem overall.
Advice for Asian Developers in 2026: Deepen Financial Use Cases and Embrace AI Agent Payments
PANews: Lastly, what advice would you give Asian developers in 2026? What should they focus on when building applications?
Jay Jog: I see two macro trends emerging:
- First, finance is gradually converging into the core application of crypto. Of course, there are many experiments in gaming and social, but we’re seeing that even in gaming, social, and other crypto use cases, the most effective on-chain implementations are often finance-related. Other modules can be built off-chain and only use state commitments or proofs on-chain. So, I believe further deepening financial use cases and playing a more significant role there is crucial.
- Second, AI will become increasingly prominent, especially with the rise of AI Agents (like products such as Multbot). Users can run their own Agents and instruct them to perform tasks. Agents are a native form of activity execution on the internet, and using a native internet currency for this makes the most sense. “Agent payments” will become a larger trend. Protocols like Coinbase’s x402 are being developed, and we’ve played a key role in helping them launch and become early ecosystem supporters. So, I believe “Agent payments” is a promising new direction, especially for emerging entrepreneurs.
