The Third Pillar of the SDF Vision
When Vannevar Bush articulated his vision of the "Endless Frontier" in 1945, he understood a fundamental truth: human progress creates entirely new industries through breakthrough infrastructure. Nearly eighty years later, the Sei Development Foundation (SDF) is operating from the same conviction.
The SDF works to accelerate innovation on the fronts of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, decentralized science (DeSci), and next-generation applications through supporting visionary founders and powerful ideas. The SDF believes the Sei Network can radically optimize the backbone of humanity’s future operating systems, now.
The third pillar of the SDF Manifesto focuses on emerging use cases which demand infrastructure capable of supporting real-time value exchange at global scale. At 5 gigagas per second throughput and sub-400ms finality, Sei Giga provides the rails to make emerging use cases, and builders’ dreams, worth pursuing.
Beyond the Speed of Human Decision-Making
Sei Giga operates at unprecedented speed for distributed, permissionless systems, infrastructure fast enough to support autonomous agentic programs, and real-time applications without the constraints of slow settlement or centralized gatekeepers.
This enables applications that couldn't exist before. Here's what that looks like across emerging use cases:
AI: Autonomous Coordination
The SDF supports innovation on the agentic AI front because it recognizes the value of true autonomy to coordinate activities. Artificial intelligence systems today operate in isolated environments, limited by their inability to transact and coordinate in real-time.
With Sei Giga, multi-agent systems can coordinate globally and trustlessly, settling transactions faster than traditional systems. This enables entirely new categories of applications that are yet to be built.
In computational biology, for example, this could enable a scientist co-pilot that automates target identification, in silico docking, and drug toxicology prediction. Combining the economic incentives(a key bottleneck in early stage research), especially in the translational phase, could leverage global communities of talent and funders to accelerate the pace of drug discovery. Ultimately this optimizes the delivery of therapies to patients beyond borders.
Thanks to decentralized coordination, and onchain AI-agents, one can imagine a future where autonomous agents search for value-aligned funders or philanthropists for specific research areas, and launch fundraises. At a high level, we may also see the optimization of supply chain quality control, catalyzing the speed of drug development.
The Sei Network provides the infrastructure where intelligent systems can operate as real economic participants rather than isolated tools, enabling coordination across previously incompatible platforms.
Decentralized Science: The Economics of Discovery
Scientific research has always been limited by chronic underfunding that can't match the pace of innovation in other industries. Traditional grant systems operate on year-long cycles while breakthrough discoveries happen in moments. The system has countless cracks that could be swiftly upgraded with the implementation of performant blockchain rails.
The SDF champions DeSci on Sei because science moves at the speed of its slowest infrastructure. Teams and researchers building toward scientific progress on Sei can fundraise for experiments, exchange data, and validate results as quickly as they can find collaborators.
Use cases the SDF is excited about include:
Research teams getting direct support, without needing to go through lengthy grant applications or rely on centralized institutions
Data markets where people can sell their valuable data with full transparency over access and usage
Peer review systems that incentivize thorough evaluation rather than fast approval, addressing the replication crisis
When the economic layer operates at the speed of scientific progress, both accelerate together.
Robotics: Physical Systems, Digital Coordination
Coordination and value transfer are some of the key ways that blockchain will be utilized by robots and in autonomous systems. In practice, this could look like sharing resources, optimizing tasks and settling payments, for example.
The Sei Network enables robotic networks to operate with economic sovereignty. Some use cases the SDF envisions include:
Autonomous vehicles that can negotiate road usage and parking in real-time
Manufacturing robots that can bid for priority processing
Delivery systems that coordinate optimal routing while settling micro-payments for infrastructure usage
When robots can transact as easily as they can move, entirely new models of automation are unlocked.
The Infrastructure Thesis
Every emerging use case the SDF champions shares a common requirement: the permissionless exchange of value must operate faster than the applications that depend on it.
When AI systems can transact autonomously, robotic networks can coordinate economically, scientific research can be funded in real-time, and financial systems can operate without latency constraints, we stand on the precipice of a Cambrian explosion of new technologies that drive human progress.
Value Exchange as the Driver of Innovation
The SDF's thesis is that innovation accelerates when value can move as quickly as ideas. Many breakthrough technologies depend on the ability to coordinate in real-time. The Sei Network provides the infrastructure that makes this coordination possible.
Simply put, the Sei Network is enabling systems that couldn't exist before. When coordination operates at machine speed rather than human speed, we unlock possibilities that seemed purely theoretical just years ago.
The emerging use cases the SDF is pursuing today represent the early applications of infrastructure that will enable innovations we haven't yet imagined. Just as broadband internet enabled streaming video that dial-up users couldn't envision, Sei Giga will enable applications that current blockchain users, even developers, can't fully comprehend, yet.
The Endless Frontier, Accelerated
The third pillar of the SDF strategy recognizes that the endless frontier of innovation requires continuous improvements in the infrastructure that supports it. In the pursuit of AI, robotics, DeSci, and the generations of applications beyond, these are not separate initiatives but interconnected explorations of what becomes possible when value moves without constraint.
Each successful deployment on the Sei Network demonstrates that theoretical possibility can become a practical reality when supported by infrastructure designed for the challenges ahead, rather than the limitations of the past.
The SDF invites builders, researchers, and innovators to join us in exploring these emerging use cases. The SDF provides not just the connections to the infrastructure to make them possible, but the strategic framework to scale them globally. Because when value exchange operates at the speed of innovation, innovation itself accelerates beyond what any single system could achieve alone.
————————————————————————————————————————————————
The Sei Development Foundation is committed to enabling emerging use cases that transform how AI, robotics, science, and finance operate at global scale. Learn more about the infrastructure driving this vision at sei.io.