Jayendra Jog is an experienced software engineer and co-founder of Sei, a layer-one blockchain crafted to cater to issues within trading applications. ^[1]

Education

Jog earned his B.S. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. ^[1]

Career

Jog grew up in the SF Bay area, where his early immersion in technology grew into a career in computer science. Taking high school computer science classes that grew his interest, he chose to pursue the field in college. During college, internships at companies like Pinterest, Facebook, and SAP exposed him to varying company sizes and pushed him into building software products. ^[2]

After graduation, he commenced his career at Robinhood, a retail trading platform, spending about a year before embarking on entrepreneurial endeavors. Despite limited success, his involvement in side projects during nights and weekends provided valuable learning experiences. ^[2]

In 2017, Jog's interest in crypto began when his roommate participated in a crypto startup launched on Binance. This initiated his exploration into the crypto domain, deepening in 2021 as he engaged with ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, and Terra. During the GameStop Saga in January 2021 at Robinhood, his role offered insights into the unprecedented surge in GameStop's stock driven by retail investors. These experiences inspired the co-founding of Sei, reflecting his commitment to decentralization and contributing to discussions about the future of financial systems. Through Sei, he focuses on building a decentralized infrastructure for exchanges. ^[2]

Interviews

User Experience

In an October 2023 interview with Oskari of Token Terminal, Jog detailed how Sei provided an optimal user experience in a decentralized network. He started with why Sei focuses on user experience, stating: ^[3]

“In every single e-commerce load that exists in Web 2 because the longer it takes like if it takes 0.1 seconds then people start noticing that some type of delay if it takes a second then people just mentally completely check out it takes a few seconds people literally just leave the web page and they go and do something else. In the case of crypto it's just accepted that oh yeah if it takes 5 Seconds that's totally fine we don't think that's a world that's going to be that we want to see five years.”

He then went on to explain how Sei created the Twin Turbo Consensus to increase user trading speed: ^[3]

“...from our side, we really focus on decreasing the time to finality, and currently, Sei is the fastest chain in existence. It offers a 390-millisecond time to finality. Sei is currently in mainnet right now, so these are numbers that we're seeing in production traffic on mainnet. The way that we achieved this was by changing the consensus mechanism. We introduced something called Twin Turbo Consensus.”

“We came up with a bunch of ideas, and that led to Twin Turbo Consensus, which helps us achieve this low time to finality. One other thing that I will say is really interesting about our consensus mechanism is its single slot finality…Single slot finality implies that for a block to be added to the network, there needs to be consensus among all the validators, and then it can be added, with no possibility of any reorg happening. Now, this is completely different from networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana. All of these networks are multi-lot finality networks, meaning a block can be added to the chain, but then afterward, a reorg can happen, and that block might be dropped.”

After being asked how Sei worked on balancing decentralization and efficiency, Jog mentioned how the company focused on user experience first in contrast to how other networks began development, stating: ^[3]

“We want to focus on the user experience first and then figure out everything else based off of offering the best user experience. Now, other networks take a fundamentally different approach. I think Ethereum would be the most fair example of that, where it's much more focused on, 'Okay, we want to support as many nodes as we can; we want to have as many validators as possible,'...So, we think that it is fundamentally a naive way to think that you can offer really good performance while still having a massive validator set. These two things go kind of opposite to each other, especially if you want these validator sets to have really low node requirements.”

When asked about where Sei would fit in a "crypto native world," he explained how the company approaches product development and how the co-founders' Silicon Valley backgrounds influenced them: ^[3]

“Taking a step back, the way that we approach, like the way that we even think about building products in general, comes from kind of our background from Silicon Valley. Like me and my co-founder, we both grew up in the San Francisco area. Our entire initial team was based in San Francisco, and we approach building products with a very Silicon Valley mindset, which is to build something that is solving a core user problem.”

He also explained how he felt about the crypto technology at the time: ^[3]

“I think most, or at least a lot of the crypto industry, it feels like it is building technology for the sake of building cool technology versus building technology for the sake of solving a problem that a user has. And this results in fundamentally different types of products and approaches that you end up seeing.”

“We think that the most important thing is to really solve this user experience problem because that is what's really preventing adoption. From the user experience problem, there's a bunch of different technical innovations that we realize are important — things like parallelization, consensus improvements. A lot of the other chains out there, they basically focus on one of these; that's their entire product, and it doesn't really fit into any kind of broader thing that they're trying to solve for.”