1/ We @panteracapital led the $10M total fundraise for @aprMEV, the MEV research and Liquid Staking layer of Monad.
Let’s learn about aPriori’s problems and opportunities of building MEV architecture 🔍🧵
open.substack.com/pub/veradiverdict/p/meva-and-apriori
2/ The stakeholders that compete to build blocks make or break the blockchain itself; if block production stalls or incentives encourage predatory behavior, the integrity of the chain crumbles and users disappear.
3/ Blockbuilders are those that physically take transactions out of a mempool and build transaction blocks that they then propagate to other blocks to reach consensus for the state of the blockchain. The design of how the stakeholders in the block building process interact with each other depends on companies that build these systems. On Ethereum, Flashbots (a Pantera portfolio company) is the go-to. On Solana, Jito is king. And when Monad launches, aPriori will dominate.
4/ The umbrella term that is used to describe the problems these companies seek to solve is “MEV” or “maximal extractable value”. The design goals that Miner Extractable Value Auction Infrastructure (MEVA) aim to solve are gas fee stability, competition, and concentration. Most of this boils down to incentives; if the stakeholders are financially compensated for adding positive externalities (or removing negative externalities) to block building, then they will do so.
5/ @monad_xyz is an upcoming new chain that will be the most performant EVM-Compatible layer 1 blockchain, with 10,000 transactions per second, 1-second block times, single-slot finality, and low-hardware requirements. Monad Labs raised $225 million and are poised to be the next big L1, having already amassed more than 300k followers on Twitter.
6/ Monad’s hyper-parrelized design brings up three design challenges:
• Indeterminism in state:
• Inability to simulate full blocks:
• Execution uncertainty:
7/ The founding team is uniquely positioned to be successful:
• @sing_me_a, CEO/Co-Founder, Prev Special Projects at Jump Crypto, Contributor at Pyth Network, Quant Trader at Flow Traders
• @0xolivia_, CTO, Prev Senior Engineer at Coinbase, Investments at Bridgewater
• Ed, Research, prev Data Scientist at VCRED, Project Leader at Los Alamos National Labs
The rest of the team has backgrounds in high frequency trading, quantitative hedge funds, and other top crypto companies.
8/ aPriori plans to take advantage of the infrastructure they’ve built to launch liquid staking onto those that run their MEVA. Jito does just this, allowing users to stake SOL and earn some of the rewards that the validators that use Jito earn. When the Monad testnet goes live and some final integrations, aPriori will launch the liquid staking protocol on Monad testnet.
9/ aPriori is also planning to release an initial version of MEVA system during Monad testnet, focusing on:
• onboarding searchers and block builders to access the block space auction,
• facilitating validator experimentation and stress testing client software.
During this testnet phase, the team invites all parties to participate in testing and provide feedback as they work towards mainnet readiness and further roadmap items like sandwich protection rpcs and analytics dashboard.
End/ Designing MEVA is a fundamental part of the inner plumbing of any blockchain. Monad’s hyper parallelized EVM L1 is a new ecosystem and requires constant innovation to ensure a positive user experience and profitable blockbuilders. The team has the experience, drive, and vision to continue doing so.