Sea state data are of major importance for climate studies, marine engineering, safety at sea, and coastal management. However, long-term sea state datasets are sparse and not always consistent, and sea state data users still mostly rely on numerical wave models for research and engineering applications. Facing the urgent need for a sea state Climate Data Record, the Global Climate Observing System has listed Sea State as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV), fostering the launch in 2018 of the Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI). The CCI is a program of the European Space Agency, whose objective is to realize the full potential of global Earth Observation archives established by ESA and its member states in order to contribute to the ECV database. This paper presents the implementation of the first release of the Sea State CCI dataset, the implementation and benefits of a high-level denoising method, its validation against in-situ measurements and numerical model outputs, and the future developments considered within the Sea State CCI project. The Sea State CCI dataset v1 is freely available on the ESA CCI website (http://cci.esa.int/data) at ftp://anon-ftp.ceda.ac.uk/neodc/esacci/sea_state/data/v1.1_release/. Three products are available: a multi-mission along-track L2P product (https://doi.org/10.5285/f91cd3ee7b6243d5b7d41b9beaf397e1, Piollé et al., 2020a), a daily merged multi mission along-track L3 product (https://doi.org/10.5285/3ef6a5a66e9947d39b356251909dc12b, Piollé et al., 2020b) and a multi-mission monthly gridded L4 product (https://doi.org/10.5285/47140d618dcc40309e1edbca7e773478, Piollé et al., 2020c).