What is the Sei Network (SEI) inflation rate?

+18.66% a year, and +4.96% in the next 90 days. That is new SEI minus what is burned or bought back, checked Oct 8 2026.

Is SEI inflationary or deflationary?

Inflationary: SEI's supply is growing, about +18.66% a year.

Where does new SEI supply come from?

Team and investor coins unlock on the 15th of every month, about 97.78M SEI in all, and the chain mints about 453,297 new SEI a day for stakers: 335.12M SEI in 90 days.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework · Inflation Analysis

SEI Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

SEI supply is growing fast and nothing takes it back. In the 90 days to Oct 7 2026, 335.12M SEI reached the market — 293.33M from team and private-sale vesting and 41.79M newly minted for stakers — against 0 bought back or burned. That is +4.98% of the circulating supply, and the next 90 days project +4.96%, because the monthly unlocks run on a fixed calendar until Aug 15 2027 and the mint runs until Aug 2033.

The verdict, in one paragraph

The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads SEI at +4.98% net new supply over the last 90 days and +4.96% over the next 90. The inflation monitor reads only +0.01%, a gap of 4.97 percentage points, which is far over our 0.5-point line, so the page carries a ⚠ monitor gap chip. The reason is dated and checkable: the float figure the monitor divides by rose every month until Feb 16 2026 and has held near 6,733.3M SEI since, so it sees none of the unlocks or the mint in this window. We keep our number. Sei Network is a chain with a heavy, scheduled unlock calendar and no buyer of its own coin: inflationary by design on the tradable float.

Sell pressure: where new SEI comes from

The largest source is vesting. The Sei team allocation sits in two on-chain vesting contracts that pay one wallet on the 15th of each month: one releases 22.22M SEI a month until Aug 15 2027, the other 20M SEI a month until Aug 15 2029. We read both contracts this session. They paid out 42.22M SEI on each of Jul 16, Aug 17 and Sep 16 2026, exactly as scheduled, and still hold 945.08M SEI. Private-sale investors bought 2B SEI with a one-year cliff and then 36 monthly releases, so they receive 55.56M SEI on the 15th of every month until Aug 15 2027. Together, vesting added 293.33M SEI in these 90 days.

The second source is protocol inflation. Sei mints new SEI once a day and pays it to stakers, following a ten-year release plan written into the chain itself: 1.5B SEI in total, in yearly tranches that shrink over time. The tranche stepped down from 180M to 165M SEI a year on Aug 15 2026, so the mint fell from 494,505 to 453,297 SEI. Over the window the mint created 41.79M SEI, and the next 90 days at the new rate create about 40.80M. Two reads of total supply this session moved by exactly one day's mint and nothing else, which confirms the mint is the only thing writing new SEI.

The Foundation and unscheduled-unlock row is 0: the Foundation's 900M allocation and the ecosystem-reserve contracts have been fully paid out to project wallets in the past, and we found no release from them in this window. The long-term-locked or bankruptcy row is also 0: no estate, trustee or lock is paying SEI out.

Buy pressure: where new SEI goes

Every buy row is 0. Sei runs no programmatic buyback — no contract, treasury or announced programme buys SEI back. There is no fee burn either: transaction fees go to validators and stakers, total supply rose by exactly the mint between our reads, and the dead addresses together hold under 1,600 SEI. No Foundation purchase shows on-chain or in any announcement. Staking is large — about 4.05B SEI is bonded with a 21-day exit — but staked SEI still counts as circulating, so a bigger stake takes nothing out of the float; it only decides who receives the mint. Planned staked-SEI exchange-traded funds would buy coins on the open market, which moves existing SEI between holders rather than removing supply.

Foundation and overhang

Four overhangs sit behind the float. The team vesting contracts hold 945.08M SEI, released 42.22M a month; we read them on-chain at every refresh. The private-sale remainder is about 611.1M SEI, released 55.56M a month until Aug 15 2027, with no readable escrow, so we follow the published schedule and check it by hand every two weeks. The staking plan still has 770.5M SEI left to mint through Aug 2033. Finally, about 940M SEI of Foundation and ecosystem-reserve coins sit outside the float in unlabelled project wallets with no published schedule, which we watch by hand. The first three are already booked in the vesting and inflation rows. If any of these balances falls faster than its schedule between refreshes, the extra outflow enters the Foundation row at the next refresh.

How SEI compares to other high-speed Layer 1s

SEI belongs to the newer class of fast Layer 1 chains launched in 2023 with large insider allocations — the same structural shape as Sui and Aptos. In all three, the dominant supply force is not the staking reward but the monthly release of team and investor coins, and in all three that calendar, not market demand, sets the pace of new supply. SEI's team and private sale together hold 40% of the 10B cap, and the private-sale stream alone keeps the monthly flow near 100M SEI until Aug 2027.

Against Ethereum, the contrast is the burn. Ethereum destroys part of every fee, which offsets some of its issuance; Sei Network pays all fees to validators, so nothing offsets its mint. Against older Cosmos-SDK chains like Cosmos Hub, which mint a percentage of supply to stakers with no fixed end, Sei's mint is capped: the 1.5B plan is a fixed amount that shrinks every August and ends in 2033, so SEI has a hard 10B ceiling that those chains lack.

The practical reading: SEI's inflation is front-loaded. Once the private-sale stream ends on Aug 15 2027, the monthly flow drops to the team contracts (20M SEI a month to 2029) plus a smaller mint, and the 90-day figure should fall well below today's level. Until then, roughly 5% of the float arrives every quarter.

What to watch in the next 90 days

The next three monthly unlocks land on Oct 15 2026, Nov 15 2026 and Dec 15 2026, each about 97.78M SEI; the team contracts are already unstaking 42.22M SEI that becomes free on Oct 14 2026, ready for the first of them.

Planned staked-SEI funds have set Oct 23 2026 as an effective date for at least one product; they would buy existing SEI and stake most of it, which changes who holds SEI, not how much exists.

A software upgrade to v6.7 is in its governance vote now, and the Giga upgrade rollout continues; neither changes the mint plan or the vesting contracts as written, and any change to either would show in the chain's own parameters, which we re-read at every rebuild.

We also watch for any move out of the unlabelled Foundation and ecosystem-reserve wallets, and for the monitor's float figure to start updating again, which would close most of today's gap.

Summary

SEI is inflationary on the tradable float: 335.12M SEI reached the market in 90 days — 293.33M from team and private-sale vesting and 41.79M from the staking mint — and nothing was bought back or burned, for a net +4.98% and a projected +4.96% next. The structure is a fixed monthly unlock calendar plus a shrinking ten-year mint. The key risk is the steady 97.78M SEI monthly release meeting demand that has to absorb it with no protocol buyer. The ceiling is the 10B cap, and the heaviest stream ends on Aug 15 2027.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of SEI, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 8 2026.