Sei Unleashes Unprecedented Speed and Efficiency in Sei v2 Driving the Ecosystem to New Heights

• SeiDB reduces active state size by 60%, leading to improved performance and faster synchronization.
• SeiDB decreases historical data growth rate by ~90%, optimizing storage and preventing performance degradation over time.
• SeiDB improves state sync times by 1200% and block sync time by 2x, enhancing overall network efficiency and responsiveness.

Since its launch on the mainnet beta in August 2023, Sei has consistently stood out as the fastest chain in existence, with block finalization taking an astonishing 390ms. However, the Sei Labs engineering team has not rested on their laurels. They have recently proposed Seiv2, the first parallelized EVM blockchain, which aims to combine the best features of Solana and Ethereum. This upgrade introduces optimistic parallelization, enabling Sei to process a higher number of transactions per second.

To support this increased transaction throughput, SeiDB takes center stage as one of the key components of Sei v2. SeiDB revolutionizes the way state access, state commitment, and state storage work, addressing the challenges posed by processing more transactions and ensuring optimal node performance.

Key Takeaways

SeiDB offers a range of impressive benefits, including:

1. Reduced active state size by 60%: SeiDB significantly reduces the size of the active state, resulting in improved performance and faster synchronization.
2. Decreased historical data growth rate by ~90%: By optimizing storage and reducing metadata requirements, SeiDB minimizes the growth rate of historical data, preventing performance degradation over time.
3. Improved state sync times by 1200% and block sync time by 2x: SeiDB’s parallelized execution and optimized storage enable lightning-fast state synchronization and block synchronization, enhancing overall network efficiency.
4. Enabled a 287x improvement in block commit times: SeiDB’s asynchronous transaction state commitment ensures consistent and rapid block commit times, irrespective of transaction volume.
5. Faster state access and state commit: SeiDB delivers accelerated state access and state commit operations, resulting in a twofold increase in overall transactions per second (TPS).
6. Maintained high performance for Sei archive nodes: SeiDB ensures that archive nodes achieve the same exceptional performance as any full node in the Sei ecosystem.

The Challenge of Blockchain Storage: Addressing State Bloat

Dynamic State:

Blockchain networks inherently require nodes to store data to achieve consensus on the chain’s state. However, as data accumulates over time, critical operations at the chain level start to slow down. Sei encountered similar challenges as its state grew beyond a certain level:

• Snapshot creation: Taking a snapshot of the state could take several hours, leading to a longer catch-up period for nodes after completing a state sync.
• State sync: Syncing the state becomes slower as the snapshot size increases, prolonging the restoration process from minutes to hours.
• Block sync: Catching up from the snapshot height to the latest chain height could take several hours, impacting the network’s overall performance.
• Validator node performance: Validator nodes may experience degraded signing performance and increased block time after prolonged operation.
• Rollback operations: Even performing a rollback of a single block could take many hours, hampering system maintenance and debugging.
• State data dumping: Investigating the state data for debugging or disaster recovery purposes could consume a couple of hours, impeding operational efficiency.

Another contributing factor to large state size is write amplification, where Sei v1’s storage ratio of useful data to metadata stands at approximately 2.5x. This means that storing 10GB of actual application state requires 15GB of metadata, resulting in 25GB of total storage usage.

Historical State:

In addition to the challenges posed by the active state, historical data growth presents its own set of issues. On the Sei v1 Atlantic-2 testnet, archive node disk usage was increasing at a staggering rate of over 150 GB per day, equivalent to around 1TB per week. This rapid storage growth leads to several negative impacts:

• Performance degradation over time: As nodes run continuously, performance starts to deteriorate, causing RPC nodes to fall behind and necessitating constant state synchronization.
• Unsustainable infrastructure costs: The need to continually increase storage capacity places a significant financial burden on service providers, potentially rendering the operation economically unsustainable.
• Challenges for archive nodes: Archive nodes struggle to keep up with the growing chain, affecting their ability to serve historical queries effectively.
• Slow historical queries: Retrieving historical data becomes a time-consuming process, impacting user experience and query response times.

Introducing SeiDB: Rapid Storage Solution for the High-Speed Blockchain

To maintain its reputation as the fastest blockchain, Sei recognized the need for an efficient storage layer to address the state bloat challenge. Sei Labs’ engineering team leveraged the work outlined in ADR-065 by the Cosmos SDK team to develop SeiDB, a groundbreaking storage solution.

The key approach implemented in SeiDB involved decoupling data into two distinct layers:

• State Commitment (SC) Layer: This layer stores the active chain state data in a memory-mapped Merkle tree, leveraging MemIAVL forefficient and reliable state commitment. By separating the active state from the historical state, SeiDB significantly reduces the active state size by approximately 60%. This reduction in size allows for faster snapshot creation, state sync, block sync, and other critical operations.

• Historical Data (HD) Layer: The historical data layer stores all the data related to past blocks, transactions, and other historical information. SeiDB optimizes storage in this layer by reducing metadata requirements and employing efficient compression techniques. This approach results in a remarkable decrease in the growth rate of historical data by around 90%, alleviating the burden of continuous storage expansion.

Unprecedented Performance Gains with SeiDB

SeiDB’s introduction brings about a multitude of performance improvements, ensuring that Sei v2 maintains its position as the fastest and most efficient blockchain. Here are some notable gains:

• State Sync Times: SeiDB achieves a staggering 1200% improvement in state sync times. With the reduced active state size and optimized storage, nodes can restore the state from a snapshot in a fraction of the time, enhancing the node’s catch-up speed and reducing downtime.

• Block Sync Times: Block synchronization, which involves catching up from the snapshot height to the latest chain height, experiences a 2x improvement. This enhancement allows the network to maintain its exceptional performance and responsiveness, even as the chain grows.
• Block Commit Times: SeiDB enables a remarkable 287x improvement in block commit times. By employing asynchronous transaction state commitment, SeiDB ensures that block commits remain consistently fast, regardless of the transaction volume. This improvement is critical for maintaining the high throughput and low latency of the Sei network.
• State Access and State Commit: SeiDB accelerates state access and state commit operations, resulting in a twofold increase in overall transactions per second (TPS). With faster state access, smart contracts and DApps can execute operations more quickly, providing a seamless user experience. Similarly, faster state commit enables rapid confirmation of transactions, reducing waiting times for users.
• Performance for Archive Nodes: SeiDB ensures that archive nodes perform at the same exceptional level as any full node in the Sei ecosystem. Archive nodes can effectively handle historical queries, maintain optimal performance, and keep up with the growing chain size without sacrificing efficiency.

Conclusion

SeiDB represents a significant milestone in addressing the challenges of blockchain storage and performance. By decoupling the active state from historical data and implementing advanced storage techniques, SeiDB reduces active state size, minimizes historical data growth, and delivers unprecedented performance gains.

With Sei v2 and SeiDB, Sei continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in blockchain technology, setting new standards for speed, efficiency, and scalability. Whether it’s state synchronization, block commits, or overall transaction throughput, SeiDB ensures that Sei remains at the forefront of the blockchain revolution.

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