What are MEV and MEVA?

aPriori is an MEV liquidity staking protocol designed to develop a reliable MEV infrastructure tailored specifically for Monad. It addresses MEV inefficiencies, high gas fees, and risks of centralization, ensuring the healthy growth of the Monad network. This solution unlocks the network’s potential for high performance and prepares it for future large-scale applications.

Before exploring aPriori further, it’s essential to understand MEV and MEVA and how they affect network performance.

MEV

MEV, or Maximal Extractable Value, is the maximum profit a block producer (or builder) can make by changing the order of transactions in a block, inserting new ones, or excluding others. Essentially, additional revenue from arbitrage opportunities arise from different transaction sequences, separate from block rewards. A common type of MEV manipulation is known as the Sandwich Attack:

Imagine Xiao Ming plans to buy a large amount of token A. Xiao Wang notices this and quickly buys some tokens first, raising the price. Unaware of this, Xiao Ming buys token A at a higher price, causing the price to increase even more. Xiao Wang then immediately sells the tokens he bought, earning a profit from the price difference.

To make sure his transaction goes through first, Xiao Wang pays higher fees to bribe the block producer, allowing him to prioritize his order. By reordering the transactions, he can manipulate the market price in his favor within a short time. These types of traders are called “Searchers.”

This behavior can harm regular users by inflating prices, making the market unfair. Moreover, network congestion and gas fees increase as more searchers compete to submit transactions. To address this issue, MEVA mechanisms were introduced to mitigate the negative effects of MEV.

MEVA

MEVA, or Maximal Extractable Value Auction, is a mechanism where the MEV within a block is auctioned off to searchers in a transparent bidding process. The highest bidder gets the right to execute the transaction, and the block builder collects the bid as revenue. This systematic bidding allows everyone a fair chance to compete for MEV, reducing harm to regular users and commercializing MEV opportunities, which also boosts miners’ and validators’ earnings, making the block production process more efficient.

Currently, MEVA is the most widely adopted solution to MEV problems. However, its implementation may vary depending on the design of different blockchain networks. aPriori’s mission is to create a suitable MEVA infrastructure for Monad, ensuring the network operates efficiently and without disruption from MEV.

Overview of aPriori

Even though Monad is a high-performance blockchain, capable of processing 10,000 transactions per second and confirming blocks within just 1 second, no blockchain, no matter how advanced, can entirely escape the impact of MEV on the network. aPriori’s mission is to address the challenges MEV poses for Monad.

aPriori is an MEV liquidity staking protocol that draws inspiration from Flashbots on Ethereum and Jito on Solana. Leveraging Monad’s delayed transaction feature, it introduces the idea of Probabilistic Valuation, which greatly reduces MEVA latency and boosts its efficiency to keep up with Monad’s high throughput.

The aPriori team brings a wealth of experience in blockchain and high-frequency trading. The CEO, Ray, was a high-frequency trader at Flow Traders for two years before joining Jump Crypto, where he helped build the Pyth Network, scaling it across 30 blockchains and serving over 150 dApps. He founded aPriori in September 2023. CTO Olivia was a senior software engineer at Coinbase, where she developed a distributed system capable of processing 1 million tracking events per second. She specializes in building robust infrastructure and high-availability systems.

To date, aPriori has raised $10.7 million, backed by notable investors such as Pantera Capital, Arrington Capital, Hashed, CMS Holdings, and Binance Labs, as well as angel investors including Keone Hon (co-founder and CEO of Monad), Mike Silagadze (founder and CEO of Ether.Fi), and Robinson Burkey (co-founder of Wormhole).

How Does Monad’s Consensus Mechanism Affect MEVA?

Comparison of Monad and Ethereum’s consensus mechanisms (Source: aPriori official documentation)

In Ethereum, consensus and transaction execution happen simultaneously—validator nodes must agree on the order of transactions and the resulting state after execution. Monad, however, uses a “delayed computation” model that separates consensus from execution. Nodes first agree on the order of transactions and then execute them later once consensus is finalized. This streamlining improves node efficiency but presents two key challenges when building a MEVA solution:

First, the block’s latest state can’t be confirmed. During Monad’s consensus process, nodes decide on the transaction order for block k during round k, validate it in round k+1, and confirm it in round k+2. When the network reaches round k+2, it only reflects the state of block k, meaning block builders and searchers can’t determine the network’s most recent state or identify the most profitable arbitrage opportunities.

Second, there’s a strict time limit. As mentioned, MEVA is a bidding process in which searchers compete for priority in a block by offering higher fees to the block builder. The speed at which blocks are produced determines how much time searchers have to place their bids. Since Monad produces blocks every 1 second, both block builders and searchers need to finish the bidding process quickly in constantly changing conditions.

aPriori’s Solution

Monad’s unique consensus mechanism presents challenges for block builders—they don’t have access to the latest block state and lack sufficient time to simulate all transactions. This makes it difficult to accurately predict the profit potential of each transaction, forcing builders to rely on past arbitrage records and the current block state to make decisions. There’s also uncertainty for arbitrageurs, as they can’t be sure their submitted transactions will be selected by the block builder, making the success of their trades unpredictable. aPriori likens this situation to that of high-frequency traders who operate based on trading signals that offer only “potential profit” and introduces the concept of Probabilistic Valuation.

Probabilistic Valuation Diagram (Source: aPriori official documentation)

Probabilistic Valuation offers a middle-ground solution for MEVA by implementing partial block auctions. It allows block builders to create block headers from arbitrageurs’ submitted transactions while validators fill in the rest of the transactions from the public mempool. This eliminates the need for builders to simulate all transactions, significantly reducing latency.

Using this technology, aPriori has developed a liquidity staking product that provides investors with dual rewards from MEV and staking while keeping their assets liquid. Additionally, aPriori works closely with oracle protocols to quickly access accurate pricing information, improving the utility and security of liquid assets and driving greater adoption of DeFi.

Currently, aPriori is still in the very early stages of development and has not released a detailed whitepaper, so understanding its solution remains somewhat limited. However, given that CEO Ray and Monad’s core team hail from Jump Crypto, it’s clear that aPriori has a close relationship with Monad. Ray has also committed to launching aPriori’s test version alongside Monad’s testnet, which will provide further insight into aPriori’s proposed concepts.

Conclusion

MEV is an inherent aspect of blockchain technology, and the design of the infrastructure around it is crucial for the network’s long-term health. As a standout project in the Monad ecosystem, aPriori’s technological and strategic ties to Monad make its future development something to watch.