ABCDE: Why we invested in aPriori

ABCDE Capital

24-07-26 20:45

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Original source: ABCDE

Original author: Joy Song

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 priority to his boarding order. In the blockchain, miners or validators are similar to this flight attendant. They can get extra benefits by adjusting the order of blocks to insert, reorder or delete transactions. We usually call this action MEV (Maximal 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, such as the blockchain, 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 block rewards, gas fees, bridge fees and other mechanisms in the blockchain are designed reasonably.

We believe that an effective MEVA will drive an ecosystem in a healthier direction. And 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. For details, please refer to this link.

Monad’s Delayed 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 a 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 to validators, as they can execute transactions at a more appropriate time, rather than having to execute them immediately upon consensus.

This means that in this delayed execution architecture, relayers or builders are not guaranteed to have the "latest state". Therefore, it is impossible to simulate against 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 operation time window extremely limited. At the same time, since searchers lack theoretical guarantees for transaction rollbacks, once validators accept the blocks built by builders, searchers will face greater execution uncertainty.

aPriori's innovative solution

aPriori proposes a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. The scheme uses partial block auctions, allowing builders to build the top of the block from the package submitted by the searcher, while validators attach the remaining transactions from the public memory pool. This method 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. These series of measures can maximize the performance of the Monad network and enhance its user experience.

In addition, we believe that with the resume of the aPriori team 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 serving as a contributor at Pyth Network, Ray has accumulated rich growth experience, helping to expand the protocol to 30 chains and serving more than 150 dApps. Olivia (CTO), a former senior software engineer at Coinbase, designed and built an internal distributed tracking pipeline that handles 1 million traces per second. She has very professional knowledge in infrastructure and high-availability systems.

End

As we enter the era of high TPS blockchains, especially as more and more users enter the web3 field and projects become more and more complex, the design of MEV infrastructure is critical to the healthy development of any network. We believe that aPriori can help Monad reach more users and improve the user experience.