Lattice reduction is a popular preprocessing strategy in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection. In a quest for developing a low-complexity reduction algorithm for large-scale problems, this paper investigates a new framework called sequential reduction (SR), which aims to reduce the lengths of all basis vectors. The performance upper bounds of the strongest reduction in SR are given when the lattice dimension is no larger than 4. The proposed new framework enables the implementation of a hash-based low-complexity lattice reduction algorithm, which becomes especially tempting when applied to large-scale MIMO detection. Simulation results show that, compared to other reduction algorithms, the hash-based SR algorithm exhibits the lowest complexity while maintaining comparable error performance.