July 26th 2024

aPriori is an MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) liquid staking platform on Monad. Its innovative design significantly reduces latency, maximizing compatibility with Monad’s high performance. The team members are from the high-frequency trading field, with experience in top companies like Jump Crypto, Flow Traders, and Coinbase. With the team’s background in top high-frequency trading crypto institutions, aPriori is building the infrastructure that helps Monad realize its potential as a high-throughput network ready for mass adoption.

Dark Forest

Imagine you’re sitting in economy class waiting for a plane. Typically, boarding is done in order, but if a wealthy passenger pays extra to upgrade, the flight attendants prioritize their boarding. In blockchain, miners or validators act like these flight attendants, adjusting the block order to insert, reorder, or delete transactions to gain additional profit. This action is known as MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).

You might ask if this seemingly ‘malicious’ behavior needs to be completely eliminated in blockchain. In the highly adversarial environment of blockchain, it’s impossible to completely “solve” or “eliminate” MEV. Instead, MEV is a fundamental attribute of blockchain, closely related to its underlying design and consensus mechanism. MEV can reflect whether the mechanism design of block rewards, gas fees, bridge fees, etc., is reasonable.

We believe an effective MEVA (MEV Auction) will promote a healthier ecosystem. aPriori is building a robust MEV auction infrastructure on Monad.

Unique of MEVA on Monad Compared to Other Ecosystems

The emergence of high-performance, parallel EVM (like Monad) brings new design opportunities for node-level infrastructure. Drawing from the experiences of Flashbots in Ethereum and Jito in Solana, the aPriori team plans to design a new MEVA to maximize the performance of the Monad network and improve user experience. This architecture will help reducing gas fees, optimizing network traffic, and driving sustainable incentives for validators on Monad.

To better understand its design principles, we need to explore the underlying architecture design of Monad. We won’t discuss the PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) architecture on Ethereum in detail here; for more information, refer to this link.

How Monad’s fast finality and deferred execution impact on MEVA?

No Guarantee of Relays or Builders Receiving the “Latest State” & Extremely Short Processing Window

In contrast to Ethereum, which requires block consensus through a transaction list (with sorting) and the Merkle root of all transaction results, Monad decouples execution and consensus, with the node protocol only needing to solve the transaction sorting problem. Delayed execution means transactions can be executed some time after being included in the consensus process. This provides validators with more flexibility, as they can execute transactions at a more appropriate time rather than immediately during consensus.

This means that in this deffered execution architecture, relayer or builders cannot guarantee having the “latest state.” Therefore, it is impossible to verify the latest block before the next block is generated, leading to some uncertainty. Additionally, Monad offers a 1-second block time and 1-second finality, making the MEVA operating window extremely limited. Furthermore, searchers lack guarantees for transaction rollbacks, facing greater execution uncertainty once validators accept the block.

aPriori’s Innovative Design

aPriori proposes a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. This solution uses partial block auctions, allowing builders to build the top of the block from searcher-submitted packages, while validators append the remaining transactions from the public mempool. This approach significantly reduces latency, maximizing Monad’s performance.

Additionally, aPriori closely collaborates with oracles, enabling them to quickly create oracle price feeds crucial for Monad ecosystem’s DeFi protocols. Its liquid staking product provides stakers with more flexibility and usability, allowing users to earn both MEV and staking rewards while maintaining asset liquidity. These measures aim to maximize Monad network’s performance and enhance user experience.

With the background of high frequency trading and deep understanding of the MEV field, aPriori are the best candidates to build MEV infrastructure for Monad, this new generation of high TPS chains.

aPriori’s Team

• Ray (CEO): Ray, the founder and CEO of aPriori, led special projects at Jump Crypto before starting the company. Previously, he was a high frequency trader at Flow Traders, overseeing quantitative strategies on emerging markets derivatives. Ray also honed his expertise in building infrastructure while leading partnership as a contributor to the top financial data oracle Pyth Network.
• Olivia (CTO): Former senior software engineer at Coinbase, designed and built an internal distributed tracking pipeline handling traffic of one million tracks per second.

Conclusion

As we enter the high-TPS blockchain era, especially with more users entering the web3 space and projects becoming increasingly complex, the design of MEV infrastructure is crucial for any network’s healthy development. We believe aPriori can help Monad reach more users and improve user experience.

About ABCDE

ABCDE is a VC focused on leading investment in top Crypto Builders. It was co-founded by Huobi Cofounder Du Jun and former Internet and Crypto entrepreneur BMAN，who both have been in the Crypto industry for more than 10 years. The co-founders of ABCDE have built multi-billion dollar companies in the Crypto industry from the ground up, including listed companies(1611.HK), exchanges(Huobi), SAAS companies(ChainUP.com), media(CoinTime.com), and developers platforms(BeWater.xyz).

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Website：www.ABCDE.com