Sei community weighs proposal to deprecate native Cosmos accounts, move to EVM-only model

Sei Labs, the primary developer and main contributor to the Sei blockchain, has submitted a Sei Improvement Proposal to go EVM-only. It recommends deprecating CosmWasm and native Cosmos accounts in favor of a more streamlined architecture.

Sei is an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible Layer 1 blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK, offering high-speed execution and cross-chain interoperability. It currently supports both EVM and native Cosmos accounts, enabling interaction across EVM and CosmWasm-based applications.

While this dual architecture has provided flexibility, it also introduces significant complexity and friction for both users and developers, Sei Labs argued in the SIP-3 proposal. Users are required to manage and link both EVM and native addresses, while developers and infrastructure providers need to build custom logic to support interoperability, increasing code complexity, maintenance overhead, and making debugging and testing more difficult, SIP author Philip Su explained.

The proposal aims to address this by improving the developer experience and simplifying Sei’s infrastructure to fully leverage its parallelized EVM as it advances toward Giga — a major upgrade targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second — Sei posted on X.

EVM-only could lead to greater adoption

More specifically, if SIP-3 is implemented, only EVM addresses would be allowed to initiate transactions on Sei, the network would only support EVM transactions going forward, and CosmWasm contracts and native Cosmos message handling would be deprecated and removed. Users would need to move assets to EVM wallets or exit Cosmos-native ones, and CosmWasm developers would have to migrate their apps and frontends to the EVM. However, Cosmos-native Sei addresses may still be used internally by the protocol, such as for validator operations, while core features like staking and governance will remain accessible, Sei Labs said.

The proposal argues the transition would lead to greater adoption, improved developer experience, a more cohesive community, and position Sei more strongly within the broader EVM ecosystem.

Since the introduction of Sei v2 in July 2024, introducing its parallelized EVM on mainnet, EVM usage has rapidly grown to dominate network activity, Su noted.

Sei new daily wallets. Image: Dune/Sei.

The SIP process lets anyone in the Sei ecosystem give feedback, ask questions, and help guide the network’s development. After a SIP is submitted, it goes through community discussion, possible revisions, a Snapshot vote, and, if approved, onchain implementation.

Sei gaining traction

Sei’s native cryptocurrency has gained significant traction over the past year, reaching a market cap of $1.1 billion to surpass projects including Optimism, Curve, and Raydium. SEI is up around 6% since SIP-3 was announced, currently trading for $0.21, according to The Block’s Sei price page.

Last week, Canary Capital filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a bid to manage what could be the first spot Sei exchange-traded fund in the United States, including a staking component.