aPriori Secures $8 Million in Seed Funding

aPriori, a liquid staking platform building on the Monad blockchain, has successfully raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Pantera Capital.

Other notable investors in this round include Consensys, OKX Ventures, CMS Holdings, ABCDE, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Flow Traders, Laser Digital, Chorus One, Everstake Capital, and Staking Facilities. The announcement was made on Thursday. The funding round also welcomed angel investors such as Spencer Noon from OurNetwork, Marc Tillement from Pyth Network, Robinson Burkey of Wormhole Foundation, TN Lee of Pendle Finance, and Zano Sherwani of Jito Labs.

The funding effort kicked off in March and concluded in April, as co-founder and CEO Ray S disclosed to The Block. This round increased aPriori’s fully diluted token valuation to a 9-figure sum, indicating it is valued at $100 million or more. Ray chose not to disclose detailed terms of the round.

With this latest funding round, aPriori’s total funding now amounts to $10 million. Last year, the project had raised $2 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Hashed and Arrington Capital. Initially, it focused on a maximal extractable value (MEV) project in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain ecosystem but later pivoted exclusively to the Monad blockchain.

Earlier on the same day, another protocol in the Monad ecosystem, Kintsu, raised $4 million in seed funding from Brevan Howard Digital, Castle Island Ventures, and others.

What is aPriori?

aPriori was established last year by Ray, a former member of Jump Crypto and the Pyth Data Association, along with Olivia Z, a former Coinbase employee. The platform aims to create an MEV-powered liquid staking service on the Monad blockchain, merging staking and MEV rewards. MEV denotes the additional value achievable from block production through the optimization of transaction order beyond the customary block reward and gas fees. aPriori plans to offer an effective MEV marketplace designed to reduce spam and enhance validator incentives on Monad, according to Ray.

The Monad blockchain has not yet launched its mainnet. Ray mentioned that once the mainnet goes live later this year, users would be able to stake their Monad tokens via aPriori, gaining rewards and receiving a liquid stake pool token applicable in various other DeFi applications.

“We have strong relationships within the Monad ecosystem and among its builders, with protocols committing to utilize our liquid staking token (LST) when Monad’s mainnet launches,” Ray stated. The project is still yet to decide on a ticker for its LST.

aPriori Launch Timeline

aPriori plans to launch the testnet of its platform on day 1 of the Monad testnet and the mainnet of its platform on day 1 of the Monad mainnet, according to Ray. Currently, Monad is active on a private internal devnet. As for aPriori’s own token, Ray mentioned there is no set timeline yet.

aPriori currently employs 14 people globally and is in the process of hiring more for engineering roles, as stated by Ray.

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