The slippage you didn't agree to, and how Sei's Giga minimizes it

If you trade crypto, you already know the woes of slippage, the difference between the price you see when you submit a trade and the price you actually get when it executes. You check the price of a swap, you confirm the transaction, and the fill comes back worse than what you saw. Every time. You bump your slippage tolerance, try again, and eat the difference. Some of that slippage is real. Some of it is the network picking your pocket. And most people never learn which is which.

The slippage that's because of the market

Some slippage is natural based on the markets. You're putting through more size than the pool can absorb cleanly, and your own order moves the price. Or the asset moves between the moment you sign and the moment you settle. Every venue has this, centralized, decentralized, doesn't matter. No design makes it disappear.

The slippage that's the network's fault

On most blockchain networks, when you submit a transaction, it goes into the mempool, a public waiting area where it sits, fully visible, until it gets picked up and processed. During that window, anyone watching can see what you're about to do: what you're buying, how much, and what price you'll accept.

And others act on it. A bot reads your pending swap, jumps in front of you to push the price up, then lets your trade go through at the higher number. That's frontrunning. The nastier version is the sandwich: one trade placed before yours and one after, extracting profit from both sides. You walk away with a fill that looks like bad luck but was actually engineered.

This is MEV, Maximal Extractable Value, and it's built into how almost every layer 1 blockchain works today. One validator at a time collects every pending transaction, sees everything, and decides the sequencing. That transparent mempool is the root exposure.

MEV has cost crypto traders billions. On any network that works this way, part of your slippage on every swap is a hidden tax that has nothing to do with the market.

What MetaMask already does to reduce slippage

MetaMask was one of the first wallets to tackle this problem head-on. Smart Transactions route your activity through a private virtual mempool instead of the public one, keeping your trades hidden from bots before they reach the network. That protection is real, it's built in, and MetaMask users on supported networks benefit from it every time they swap.

That's the wallet doing its job: shielding you at the point where you interact with the network. But the strongest protection comes when the network itself is designed the same way. When both layers work together, there's nowhere left for MEV to hide.

That's exactly what Sei's Giga brings to the table.

How Giga adds network-level protection

The consensus architecture. Most networks rely on one validator at a time to handle everything, single-proposer consensus. Giga will replace this with multi-proposer consensus—the first EVM blockchain network to do so. Every validator runs its own lane, streaming transactions in parallel. A coordinator periodically snapshots all the lanes and commits them together. No single chokepoint where someone controls sequencing, no single point where your activity can be gamed.

A private transaction layer called Sedna. When you submit a trade on Giga, Sedna will split it into encoded fragments and spreads them across multiple validators. No single validator ever sees the full picture of what you're doing. The fragments only get reassembled after the network has already locked in the order of the block.

The network commits to the sequence before anyone can read what's in it. And the ordering rule is fixed—sorted by fee priority, duplicates dropped—so nobody can rearrange things after the fact either.

Frontrunning needs visibility into your trade. Sandwiching needs control over what goes around it. With Giga, they’re an order of magnitude harder.

The network speed. Giga finalizes transactions in under 250 milliseconds. The window between confirming a transaction and getting a final fill shrinks to the point where the price you see and the price you get are practically the same—less room for even normal volatility to move against you.

Why two layers are better than one

When MetaMask connects to Sei Giga, users get protection at both levels. Smart Transactions keep your activity private on the way in. Giga's architecture keeps it private all the way through consensus and execution. Protection is default for every transaction and is not dependent on any single relay staying available.

What you're left with

After Giga, the slippage you see on Sei is the real kind: liquidity, volatility, trade size. The invisible MEV surcharge is gone. This matters beyond individual trades. MEV is one of the reasons DeFi liquidity is still thinner than it could be. Professional market makers tighten their quotes when they're confident their orders won't get picked off by bots watching the mempool. On networks without that protection, they quote wider or sit out entirely. Remove that extraction at the protocol level and you create conditions where tighter liquidity actually shows up. Better fills follow from that, not just faster processing alone.

The rest of the picture

Giga handles up to 200,000 transactions per second and it's fully EVM-compatible—MetaMask connects natively, Solidity contracts deploy without changes. No new wallet, no new tools. The speed and EVM compatibility serve the actual point: a trading network where the infrastructure works with the people using it, not against them.

Explore the full technical design in v2 of Sei's Giga whitepaper at giga.seilabs.io.