ABCDE: Why We Invested in aPriori, the MEV Liquidity Staking Platform on Monad?

Author: ABCDE

Date: July 26th 2024

aPriori is a MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) staking platform on Monad. Its innovative probabilistic valuation design significantly reduces latency and is optimized for Monad’s high-performance architecture.

The team members come from the high-frequency trading (HFT) industry, with professional experience at top-tier firms such as Jump Crypto, Flow Traders, and Coinbase. Leveraging their deep expertise from leading HFT and crypto institutions, aPriori’s MEV builder infrastructure will unlock Monad’s potential, enabling large-scale applications on high-performance blockchains.

The Dark Forest

Imagine you’re sitting in economy class waiting to board a flight. Normally, passengers board in order. But if a wealthy traveler pays extra to upgrade to first class, the flight attendant may prioritize their boarding. In blockchain terms, miners or validators act like these flight attendants—they reorder, insert, or even remove transactions to extract additional profits. This practice is commonly known as MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).

You might wonder whether such seemingly "malicious" behavior should be completely eliminated in blockchains. However, in the highly adversarial environment of blockchain—akin to a dark forest—you cannot fully “solve” or “eliminate” MEV. Instead, MEV is a fundamental property deeply tied to blockchain’s underlying design and consensus mechanisms. MEV can actually reflect how well-designed a blockchain’s incentive structures are, including block rewards, gas fees, and bridge costs.

We believe that an effective MEVA (Miner Extractable Value Auction) system can guide an ecosystem toward healthier development. aPriori is building a powerful Miner Extractable Value Auction (MEVA) infrastructure on Monad.

What Makes MEVA on Monad Different from Other Ecosystems?

The emergence of high-performance, parallelized Ethereum Virtual Machines (like Monad) opens new design opportunities for node-level infrastructure. Drawing lessons from Flashbots on Ethereum and Jito on Solana, the aPriori team plans to build a novel architecture that maximizes performance on the Monad network while enhancing user experience. The design focuses on reducing gas fees, optimizing network throughput, and establishing sustainable incentives for validators.

To better understand its architectural principles, we must first examine Monad’s underlying design. Here, we won’t go into detail about Ethereum’s PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) model; for more information, please refer to this link (related link).

Monad's Deferred Execution and Its Impact on MEVA

No Guarantee That Relays or Builders Receive the "Latest State" & Extremely Short MEV Processing Window

Source: aPriori

Unlike Ethereum, where block consensus requires both a transaction list (with ordering) and the Merkle root of all post-execution states, Monad decouples execution from consensus. The node protocol only needs to agree on transaction ordering. Deferred execution means transactions can be executed some time after they’ve been included in the consensus process. This gives validator nodes greater flexibility, allowing them to execute transactions at more optimal times rather than immediately during consensus.

Under this deferred execution model, relays or builders cannot guarantee access to the “latest state.” Therefore, simulation based on the most recent block becomes impossible before the next block is produced, introducing significant uncertainty. Moreover, Monad offers a 1-second block time and 1-second finality, leaving an extremely narrow time window for MEVA operations. Additionally, due to the lack of theoretical rollback guarantees for searchers, once a validator accepts a block built by a builder, searchers face higher execution risk.

aPriori's Innovative Solution

aPriori introduces a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. This approach uses partial block auctions, allowing builders to construct the top portion of a block from bundles submitted by searchers, while validators append the remaining transactions from the public mempool. This method dramatically reduces latency and is optimally aligned with Monad’s high-performance requirements.

Source: aPriori MEVA

In addition, aPriori collaborates closely with oracles to rapidly generate price feeds, which are critical for DeFi protocols within the Monad ecosystem. Its liquid staking product provides greater flexibility and utility for stakers, enabling users to earn both MEV rewards and staking yields while maintaining liquidity of their assets. These initiatives collectively maximize Monad’s network performance and enhance user experience.

Beyond technology, we believe that given aPriori’s exceptional team background and deep understanding of the MEV landscape, they are the ideal choice to become Monad’s premier MEV infrastructure provider.

The aPriori Team

• Ray (CEO): Former high-frequency trader at Jump Crypto and Flow Traders. As a contributor to Pyth Network, Ray gained extensive growth experience, helping scale the protocol to over 30 chains and serving more than 150 dApps.
• Olivia (CTO): Former senior software engineer at Coinbase, where she designed and built internal distributed tracing pipelines handling one million traces per second. She possesses deep expertise in infrastructure and highly available systems.

Conclusion

As we enter the era of high-TPS blockchains—especially with increasing web3 adoption and growing application complexity—the design of MEV infrastructure becomes crucial for any network’s long-term health. We believe aPriori will help Monad reach more users and deliver a superior user experience.

About ABCDE

ABCDE is a venture capital firm focused on leading investments in top-tier crypto builders. It was co-founded by Du Jun, co-founder of Huobi with over 10 years of experience in the crypto industry, and BMAN, a former internet and crypto entrepreneur. The co-founders of ABCDE have built multiple billion-dollar market cap companies from scratch within the crypto space. Being founders themselves, they deeply understand the challenges and needs of builders. To date, ABCDE has helped its portfolio companies establish a comprehensive ecosystem including a publicly listed company (1611.HK), an exchange (Huobi), a SaaS company (ChainUP), a media platform (CoinTime.com), and a developer platform (BeWater.xyz).

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