aPriori, an innovative liquid staking platform anchored to the Monad blockchain, has successfully amassed $8 million in a seed funding round spearheaded by Pantera Capital.

Additional prominent contributors to this funding round included Consensys, OKX Ventures, CMS Holdings, ABCDE, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Flow Traders, Laser Digital, Chorus One, Everstake Capital, and Staking Facilities, as confirmed by aPriori on Thursday. Esteemed angel investors, such as Spencer Noon of OurNetwork, Marc Tillement of Pyth Network, Robinson Burkey of Wormhole Foundation, TN Lee of Pendle Finance, and Zano Sherwani of Jito Labs, also participated.

The fundraising initiative for the seed round commenced in March and concluded in April, according to co-founder and CEO Ray S, as disclosed to The Block. This round propelled aPriori’s fully diluted token valuation to a significant “9-figure” benchmark, equating to at least $100 million, although Ray refrained from elaborating on the round’s specific structure.

Cumulatively, the seed round enhances aPriori’s total funding to $10 million. Previously, the project secured $2 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Hashed and Arrington Capital. Initially, the venture was centered on a maximal extractable value (MEV) initiative within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain ecosystem, but subsequently pivoted to focus exclusively on the Monad blockchain ecosystem, Ray explained.

On the same day, another Monad-affiliated liquid staking protocol, Kintsu, secured $4 million in seed funding from Brevan Howard Digital, Castle Island Ventures, and others.

Understanding aPriori

Founded last year by Ray, an alumnus of Jump Crypto and Pyth Data Association, alongside Olivia Z, a former Coinbase alumna, aPriori is developing an MEV-powered liquid staking platform on the Monad blockchain, seamlessly integrating staking and MEV rewards. MEV denotes the additional value that can be extracted from block production by optimizing transaction ordering beyond the standard block reward and gas fees. aPriori aims to create an efficient MEV marketplace that minimizes spamming and enhances validator incentives on Monad, according to Ray.

The Monad blockchain’s mainnet has yet to launch. Ray indicated that upon the mainnet’s activation later this year, users will be able to stake their Monad tokens with aPriori, garner rewards, and obtain a liquid stake pool token that can be utilized across other DeFi applications.

“We have cultivated strong alliances within Monad’s ecosystem and its developers, with various protocols committing to leverage our liquid staking token (LST) as Monad’s mainnet approaches,” Ray stated. The ticker for the LST has not yet been determined.

aPriori Launch Timeline

Ray revealed that aPriori will unveil the testnet of its platform concurrent with the Monad testnet’s initiation, and will launch the mainnet of its platform simultaneously with Monad’s mainnet debut. Presently, Monad is operational on a private internal devnet. Regarding aPriori’s own token launch, Ray noted that no timeline has been established.

aPriori currently employs 14 individuals globally and is actively seeking to expand its engineering team, Ray added.