Sei Wallets to Come Pre-Installed on Millions of Xiaomi Phones

What to know:

• Sei's crypto wallet and discovery app will be pre-installed on millions of Xiaomi smartphones sold outside China and the US, starting in 2026.
• The app will enable peer-to-peer payments, access to decentralized apps, and Web3 exploration, as well as stablecoin payments in retail stores.
• The partnership aims to drive mainstream blockchain adoption, leveraging Sei's fast and scalable infrastructure and a $5 million fund to support mobile app developers.

The Sei Development Foundation, a non-profit advancing the Sei network, is embedding its crypto wallet directly into millions of Xiaomi smartphones as part of a new global partnership aimed at mainstream blockchain adoption.

Starting in 2026, a wallet and crypto discovery app developed by Sei Labs will be pre-installed on all new Xiaomi phones sold outside mainland China and the United States. Xiaomi is the world’s third-largest mobile vendor, with an over 13% market share, trailing only Apple and Samsung.

The app enables users to send peer-to-peer payments, access decentralized applications, and explore Web3 products without requiring the download of additional software.

Sei also plans to roll out stablecoin payments for Xiaomi’s 20,000-plus retail stores, beginning in Hong Kong and the European Union.

“The collaboration will provide millions of people with their first entry point into crypto, especially in countries where Xiaomi dominates the smartphone landscape, like Greece (36.9%) and India (24.2%),” a press release shared with CoinDesk reads.

Customers could soon buy the company’s suite of products, which includes smartphones, tablets and even electric scooters, using stablecoins like USDC with transactions settled over the Sei blockchain.

"Most blockchains haven’t prioritized performance the way they should have," Sei Labs Co-Founder Jay Jog told CoinDesk in an interview during Devconnect Buenos Aires last month. "We’re trying to preempt the activity we know is coming—payments, trading, real-world financial volume—so we’re building a chain that can handle that now."

The network, Jog added, is looking to “build a decentralized NASDAQ” and is targeting 200,000 transactions per second as it aims to bring the financial ecosystem onchain.

To support broader adoption, the Sei Development Foundation has launched a $5 million Global Mobile Innovation Program, designed to fund developers building consumer apps that run on mobile devices.

While funding helps, during the interview with CoinDesk, Jog admitted that capital alone isn’t enough to bootstrap the network’s adoption.

“The biggest bottleneck typically ends up being just finding customers and having good distribution channels,' he said, noting that 'just giving a 50k grant doesn’t solve that problem.” Being pre-installed on millions of smart devices may, however, be a piece of the puzzle.

Sei says its infrastructure, which uses a parallelized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), can process thousands of transactions per second and offers finality in under 400 milliseconds. Jog said the long-term goal is to power everything from stock trading to in-store payments at scale.

The network’s speed could help ease user concerns. Jog contrasted this with older blockchains, where users are left “sitting there scared” waiting for confirmations. On Sei, he said, “you blink an eye and the payment is finalized."