Crypto Traders Flock to Sei and Its Dragon Ball-Inspired Meme Coin—Will It Last?

New year, SEIYAN meme coin hype on the Sei Network.

The SEI network’s eponymous token has seen a 43% increase in the past week and is currently sitting at a $1.6 billion market capitalization. But that’s nothing compared to the price action on the SEIYAN meme coin, so-named for the Dragon Ball inspired term that SEI token holders have given themselves.

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There’s now also a Seiyans NFT collection full of pointy-haired, powered up, and pixelated images. No word yet on whether Akira Toriyama or any of the other intellectual property holders for Dragon Ball have been in touch.

The team that runs the Seiyans NFT X account didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.

Earlier today it looked like the SEIYAN token had grown by 214% in the past week. But by Tuesday afternoon, it was up 99% over the past 7 days. Keep in mind, the SEIYAN meme coin was only just minted a week ago on December 27. At the time of writing, it’s trading at $0.04993842 according to CoinGecko—a 20% drop from its price yesterday.

Still, the SEI and SEIYAN trading pair has done more volume—$6.5 million—than any other on the network, according to Gecko Terminal.

When the SEI network launched in August 2023, trading for the SEI token surpassed $1 billion in one day—almost enough to have generated more volume than Bitcoin and Ethereum at the time. The Layer 1 blockchain, built on the Cosmos ecosystem, was billed as the fastest ever.

But there was a lot of controversy over the network’s SEI token airdrop. Developers who had been building on the Sei testnet believed that they would receive airdropped tokens when the mainnet went live on August 15 and were disgruntled when it was delayed. The hashtag “#seiscam” began trending on X (formerly Twitter) as users lodged complaints about it.

The network has raised a total of $35 million across two rounds, with the latest closing in April 2023. Its investors include Jump Crypto and Multicoin Capital—two firms that are also heavily invested in layer-1 competitor Solana.

The Sei Network had a similar launch to that of its competitors, Aptos and Sui. Aptos, which reached an eye-watering $1 billion valuation ahead of its launch in October 2022, but had its launch marred by questions about its tokenomics. Sui, a competitor to Aptos which itself was meant to be a “Solana killer,” launched its mainnet in May 2023.

Despite all the hype, neither of the networks has performed anywhere near as well as Solana—the blockchain their marketing said they’d make obsolete.

Edited by Guillermo Jimenez.