As early as 2007, Alibaba and Ant Group internally developed a distributed transaction middleware to solve the consistency problem of application data in e-commerce, payment, logistics, and other business scenarios. The internal projects were respectively called TXC (Taobao Transaction Constructor)/XTS (eXtended Transaction Service), and were used in almost every transaction payment process of each order.
Since 2013, Alibaba and Ant Group have separately released distributed transaction cloud service products, GTS(Global Transaction Service)/DTX (Distributed Transaction-eXtended), on Alibaba Cloud and Financial Cloud for enterprise customers. They have accumulated a large number of users in various industries.
In January 2019, Alibaba Group officially open-sourced the project, naming it Fescar (Fast & Easy Commit and Rollback). Since its open-source release, it has been warmly welcomed and praised by numerous developers, gaining over 3k stars in just one week and once topping the GitHub Trending list.
In April 2019, the Ant Group Data Middleware Team joined the Fescar community. In order to create a more open and neutral community, Fescar was renamed Seata (Simple Extensible Autonomous Transaction Architecture), and the code repository was migrated from the Alibaba organization to its independent Seata organization.
In December 2019, the Seata open-source project officially released version 1.0.0 GA, marking that the project is ready for production use.
In October 2023, in order to better drive the evolution of technology through the community, Alibaba and Ant Group officially donated Seata to the Apache Foundation. The proposal has been approved by the Apache Foundation's voting resolution, and Seata officially entered the Apache Incubator.