Author: Jonathan Gieg, Senior Platform Assistant at Pantera Capital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
1. The future of MEV
The advancement of blockchain technology is driven by the need for higher throughput, lower latency, and more efficient transaction processing. The emergence of high-throughput public chains such as Monad represents a major leap forward for blockchain technology, with Monad's goal of delivering 10,000 transactions per second and completing block confirmations within 1 second. However, while blockchain is vigorously optimizing performance, it also faces problems such as inefficient miner extractable value (MEV), high gas fees, and centralization risks.
2. Why did we invest in aPriori?
aPriori's mission is to solve fundamental challenges in the MEV space on Monad by developing high-performance infrastructure tailored for its network. Let's talk about why we are interested in aPriori:
(1) Innovative MEV infrastructure
aPriori is building a reliable MEV infrastructure that enables Monad validators to obtain blocks from an external network of block builders and benefit from MEV-related activities. Inspired by companies such as Flashbots and Jito Labs, aPriori has updated its core architecture to adapt to Monad's unique design. aPriori's solution involves partial block auctions, allowing block headers to be built from transaction packages submitted by searchers, while validators append remaining transactions from the public memory pool. This greatly reduces latency and eliminates the need to simulate full block proposals.
(2) Enhanced user experience
By introducing structure to the MEV market, aPriori contributes to the decentralization of the Monad Network and improves the overall user experience by reducing gas fees for users, driving sustainable incentives for validators, and minimizing validator and node traffic.
(3) Strategic Liquidity Staking Solutions
aPriori's liquidity staking product provides investors with greater flexibility and utility, allowing users to maintain liquidity of their holdings while earning MEV and staking rewards. aPriori has created a technological moat around their liquidity staking solution by leveraging their MEV infrastructure. Their close relationships with major oracle providers in the Monad ecosystem allow them to quickly create oracle price feeds, an important component in driving DeFi adoption. This strategic positioning enables aPriori to solve significant challenges faced by other liquidity staking protocols.
(4) Excellent team
aPriori’s main advantage comes from its outstanding team of industry veterans with extensive blockchain and high-frequency trading experience. The core members of the executive team are:
CEO Ray: Ray has led special projects at Jump Crypto and worked as a high-frequency trader at Flow Traders. As a contributor to Pyth Network, Ray brings rich experience in middleware development. At Pyth Network, he helped the protocol expand to 30 chains and serve more than 150 dApps.
CTO Olivia: Olivia was a senior software engineer at Coinbase, where she designed and built an internal distributed tracing pipeline that handles 1 million traces per second. She brings expertise in infrastructure and high-availability systems.
We are excited to lead aPriori’s $8M seed round as they continue to build the infrastructure essential for MEV and liquidity staking on Monad.
