a startup co-founded by a former Robinhood engineer and a former VC from Coatue, has launched a new open sourced project that offers a novel and exciting approach to make Ethereum faster and less expensive for developers.

On Wednesday, Sei launched The Parallel Stack, a public good project — meaning free for any crypto developers to use. It aims to improve the performance of transactions per second (TPS) of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based layer-2 blockchains through the tried-and-true computer science concept of parallel processing, TechCrunch learned exclusively.

Sei Labs is a company the crypto community is already watching after it raised $30 million, at a valuation of $800 million, about a year ago to build its own super-speedy, open source, layer-1 blockchain focused specifically on crypto trading.

But now Sei has turned its attention to help improve Ethereum, a far bigger, more established blockchain, the biggest by total value locked, according to CoinMarketCap — aka the value of all the digital assets on the network.

By default, EVMs process transactions sequentially, one after another, a slow and inefficient method that doesn’t scale well.

“The biggest limitation of the EVM is the lack of throughput,” Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, formerly of Robinhood, told TechCrunch. Ethereum’s throughput can’t go beyond 50 TPS, which is limiting growth of its ecosystem and results in high so-called gas fees, the fees charged to transact on Ethereum blockchains. These fees make Ethereum unaffordable for “99.9% of normal users,” Jog added.

Aside from The Parallel Stack, Sei Labs has also been working on upgrading its blockchain to Sei V2, a parallelized EVM, which processes multiple transactions simultaneously and would make it accessible to a “global base of EVM developers,” according to a November 2023 blog post. “We’ve been working on scaling EVM for a long time and doing it by parallelizing,” Jog said.