Original author: Joy Song, ABCDE
aPriori is a MEV liquidity staking platform on Monad. Its innovative probabilistic verification design greatly reduces latency and maximizes the high performance of Monad. Its team members come from the field of high-frequency trading and have experience in top companies such as Jump Crypto, Flow Traders and Coinbase. With the team's background in top high-frequency trading companies and crypto institutions, aPriori's MEV construction infrastructure will unleash the potential of Monad to support large-scale applications on high-performance public chains.
Dark Forest
Imagine you are waiting for a flight in economy class. Normally, boarding is done in order. However, if a wealthy person is willing to pay extra to upgrade in advance, the flight attendant will immediately give him priority in boarding. In the blockchain, miners or validators are similar to this flight attendant. They can get extra benefits by adjusting the block order to insert, reorder or delete transactions. We usually call this action MEV (Maximal Extractable Value), which is the maximum extractable value.
You may ask, does this seemingly "malicious" behavior need to be completely eliminated in the blockchain? In a highly confrontational environment like the Dark Forest, it is impossible to completely "solve" or "eliminate" MEV. On the contrary, MEV is the most basic attribute of the blockchain, which is closely related to the underlying design and consensus mechanism of the blockchain. MEV can reversely map whether the mechanism design of block rewards, gas fees, bridge fees, etc. in the blockchain is reasonable.
We believe that an effective MEVA will drive an ecosystem in a healthier direction. aPriori is building a powerful miner extractable value auction infrastructure (MEVA) on Monad.
What makes MEVA on Monad unique from other ecosystems
The emergence of high-performance, parallel Ethereum virtual machines such as Monad has brought new design opportunities for node-level infrastructure. Drawing on the experience of Ethereum Flashbots and Jito on Solana, the aPriori team plans to design a new architecture to maximize the performance of the Monad network and improve user experience. The architecture will focus on reducing gas fees, optimizing network traffic, and promoting sustainable incentives for validators.
In order to have a deeper understanding of its design principles, we need to first explore the underlying architecture design of Monad. We will not discuss the PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) architecture on Ethereum in detail here, but please refer to this link for details.
Monad Deferred Execution and Its Impact on MEVA
No guarantee that relayers or builders receive the “latest state” & extremely short MEV processing window
Source: aPriori
Unlike Ethereum, where block consensus is reached through a list of transactions (with ordering) and the Merkle root of all transaction result states, Monad decouples execution from consensus, and the node protocol only needs to solve the transaction ordering problem. Delayed execution means that the execution of a transaction can be performed some time after it is included in the consensus process. This provides more flexibility for validating nodes because they can execute transactions at a more appropriate time instead of having to execute them immediately at consensus.
This means that in this delayed execution architecture, relayers or builders cannot guarantee to have the "latest state". Therefore, it is impossible to simulate the latest block before the next block is generated, which leads to a certain degree of uncertainty. Moreover, Monad provides a 1-second block time and 1-second finality, which makes MEVA's operating time window extremely limited. At the same time, since searchers lack theoretical guarantees for transaction rollbacks, once the validator accepts the block built by the builder, the searcher will face greater execution uncertainty.
aPriori’s innovative solutions
aPriori proposed a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. The scheme uses partial block auctions, allowing builders to build the top of the block from the packages submitted by searchers, while validators append the remaining transactions from the public memory pool. This approach greatly reduces latency and maximizes the performance of Monad.
Source: aPriori MEVA
At the same time, aPriori also works closely with oracles to enable them to quickly create oracle price feeds, which is critical to the Defi protocol of the Monad ecosystem. Its liquid staking products provide more flexibility and practicality for stakers, allowing users to obtain MEV and staking rewards while maintaining the liquidity of their holdings. This series of measures can maximize the performance of the Monad network and enhance its user experience.
In addition, we believe that with the aPriori team’s resume and their deep understanding of the MEV track, they will be the most suitable candidates for Monad, a new generation of high-speed public chain MEV Infra.
aPriori Team
Ray (CEO) has experience as a high-frequency trader at Jump Crypto and Flow Traders. While working as a contributor at Pyth Network, Ray gained extensive growth experience, helping to scale the protocol to 30 chains and serving over 150 dApps. Olivia (CTO), a former senior software engineer at Coinbase, designed and built an internal distributed tracing pipeline that handles 1 million traces per second. She has very professional knowledge in infrastructure and high-availability systems.
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As we enter the era of high TPS blockchains, especially as more and more users enter the web3 space and projects become more complex, the design of MEV infrastructure is critical to the healthy development of any network. We believe aPriori can help Monad reach more users and improve the user experience.
