The recent news that Monad ecosystem developer @apr_labs has secured $20M in funding has garnered considerable attention. You might be curious about the protocol that has garnered investment from top VCs like YZI Labs, Pantera, and Consensys. Let's explain:
1) aPriori is officially positioned as a high-frequency trading (HFT)-level CeDeFi platform protocol. In Crypto Native's terms, it is a MEV infrastructure and liquid staking protocol built on the Monad platform.
Such explanations make sense because aPriori is essentially doing one thing: integrating Wall Street's high-frequency trading system with Crypto's MEV capture mechanism.
Specifically: aPriori aggregates funds by issuing LSD tokens of $aprMON, and then builds a three-layer flywheel system based on this:
The bottom layer captures MEV revenue and shares it with pledgers, the middle layer uses AI to intelligently analyze order flows to improve transaction placement rates, and the top layer provides institutional-level transaction execution through the Swapr aggregator.
In simple terms, aPriori's protocol innovations are to Monad what the combination of "jito + Jupiter" is to Solana, and then these innovations are implemented into institutional-level trading products using Wall Street high-frequency trading technology.
2) After a comprehensive understanding, I extracted two of what I think are aPriori's greatest innovations:
1. It integrates MEV and aggregated transactions into a set of infrastructure rather than two independent products:
Jito and Jupiter on Solana are independent protocols. Jito acts as an intermediary in the MEV auction market to earn auction fees, while Jupiter focuses on aggregating liquidity and transaction routing.
aPriori’s uniqueness lies in: using AI to identify order flow opportunities in real time, executing them in milliseconds, and then distributing the profits to stakers through aprMON.
Transactions submitted by Swapr go directly through aPriori's MEV channel, enjoying faster confirmation and MEV protection. This integrated flywheel design from entry to execution to dividends is particularly suitable for emerging public chains with high concurrency and high performance such as Monad.
2. It transforms order flow from a “negative externality” into a “tiered pricing product”
All order information in traditional DEXs is treated equally, and transaction precision is very low, which can lead to serious user experience issues. For example, the arbitrage behavior of MEV bots will affect the transaction slippage of ordinary users, and the temporary Fomo transactions of a large number of ordinary users will affect the network stability required for institutional-level transactions, etc.
To address this, aPriori's solution is to use AI to productize and tier order flows, analyzing the "toxicity" of each transaction in real time and then pricing them in different levels. For example:
Highly toxic orders (arbitrage bots) charge high fees and guide them to the open market for PVP; mildly toxic orders (private transactions) charge medium fees and use dark pools for isolated execution; non-toxic orders (ordinary users) charge preferential fees and enjoy the best execution price.
This kind of product-based segmentation with tiered pricing actually turns the original zero-sum game into a positive-sum game. It is equivalent to subsidizing the transaction experience of ordinary users with the high cost of toxic transactions. Everyone gets what they need without affecting each other.
This reminds me that Robinhood also achieved a "zero transaction fee" experience for retail investors by selling their orders to market makers. In comparison, aPriori not only borrowed from this mature TradFi mechanism, but also made the system transparent and decentralized, and did not retain any value for itself. Finally, the value was returned to all participants through aprMON.
above.
In short, the $20 million that institutions are rushing to invest is not about buying a simple DeFi protocol, but more about buying the monopoly rights of the "new MEV+high-frequency trading infrastructure" of the future Monad ecosystem or even the broader EVM ecosystem?
It integrates TradFi's high-frequency trading, AI's intelligent layered routing, and Crypto's MEV capture into a new "species": an integrated solution that integrates mining, trading, and dividends.
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