ABCDE: Why We Invest in aPriori

Original Author: Joy Song, ABCDE

aPriori is an MEV liquidity staking platform on Monad. Its innovative probabilistic verification design greatly reduces latency and maximizes compatibility with Monad's high performance. Its team members come from the high-frequency trading field, with experience at top companies such as Jump Crypto, Flow Traders, and Coinbase. With the team's background in top high-frequency trading firms and crypto institutions, aPriori's MEV infrastructure will unleash Monad's potential, supporting large-scale applications on high-performance public chains.

Dark Forest

Imagine you are sitting in economy class waiting for your flight; usually, boarding is done in order of arrival. However, if a wealthy person is willing to pay extra to board early, the flight attendants will prioritize their boarding. In the blockchain, miners or validators are similar to these flight attendants, adjusting the block order to insert, reorder, or delete transactions to gain extra profits. We usually refer to this action as MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).

You might ask whether this seemingly 'malicious' behavior needs to be completely eliminated in the blockchain. In a highly adversarial environment like the blockchain, it is impossible to completely "solve" or "eliminate" MEV. On the contrary, MEV is one of the most fundamental properties of blockchain, closely related to the underlying design and consensus mechanism of the blockchain. MEV can reflect whether the design of mechanisms such as block rewards, gas fees, and bridging fees in the blockchain is reasonable.

We believe that an effective MEVA will drive an ecosystem towards a healthier direction. aPriori is building a powerful miner extractable value auction infrastructure (MEVA) on Monad.

Unique Aspects of MEVA on Monad Compared to Other Ecosystems

The emergence of high-performance, parallel Ethereum Virtual Machines (like Monad) brings new design opportunities for node-level infrastructure. Drawing on the experiences of Ethereum Flashbots and Jito on Solana, the aPriori team plans to design a brand new architecture to maximize the performance of the Monad network and enhance user experience. This architecture will focus on reducing gas fees, optimizing network traffic, and promoting sustainable incentives for validators.

To gain a deeper understanding of its design principles, we need to first explore the underlying architectural design of Monad. We will not discuss the PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) architecture on Ethereum in detail here; specific content can be referenced in this link.

Delayed Execution of Monad and Its Impact on MEVA

No guarantee that relays or builders can receive the "latest state" & extremely short MEV processing window

Source: aPriori

Unlike Ethereum, where block consensus is achieved through a transaction list (with sorting) and the Merkle root of all transaction result states, Monad decouples execution from consensus, allowing the node protocol to only solve the transaction ordering problem. Delayed execution means that the execution of transactions can occur after they have been included in the consensus process for a period of time. This provides more flexibility for validating nodes, as they can execute transactions at a more suitable time rather than having to execute them immediately during consensus.

This means that under this delayed execution architecture, relays or builders cannot guarantee they have the "latest state." Therefore, it is impossible to simulate against the latest block before the next block is generated, leading to a certain degree of uncertainty. Moreover, Monad provides a 1-second block time and 1-second finality, which makes the operational time window for MEVA extremely limited. Additionally, due to the lack of theoretical guarantees for transaction rollbacks, once a validator accepts a block built by a builder, the searchers will face greater execution uncertainty.

aPriori's Innovative Solutions

aPriori proposes a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. This approach utilizes partial block auctions, allowing builders to construct blocks from the top of the packages submitted by searchers, while validators append the remaining transactions from the public mempool. This method greatly reduces latency and maximizes compatibility with Monad's performance.

Source: aPriori MEVA

At the same time, aPriori is closely collaborating with oracle providers to enable them to quickly create oracle price feeds, which are crucial for the Defi protocols in the Monad ecosystem. Its liquid staking product provides stakers with more flexibility and utility, allowing users to maintain the liquidity of their held assets while also earning MEV and staking rewards. These 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 background and their deep understanding of the MEV space, they are the most suitable candidates for the MEV Infra of this new generation of high-speed public chains like Monad.

aPriori's Team

Ray (CEO), has experience as a high-frequency trader at Jump Crypto and Flow Traders. During his time as a contributor at Pyth Network, Ray accumulated rich growth experience, helping to expand the protocol to 30 chains, serving over 150 dApps. Olivia (CTO), formerly a senior software engineer at Coinbase, designed and built an internal distributed tracking pipeline that handles a traffic of 1 million tracks per second. She has very specialized knowledge in infrastructure and high-availability systems.

Conclusion

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