Monad liquid staking platform aPriori hits $100 million token valuation with seed funding

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

Other investors in the round included Consensys, OKX Ventures, CMS Holdings, ABCDE, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Flow Traders, Laser Digital, Chorus One, Everstake Capital and Staking Facilities, aPriori said Thursday. Angel investors, including 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 joined the round.

aPriori began raising funds for the seed round in March and closed it in April, co-founder and CEO Ray S told The Block. The round brought aPriori's fully diluted token to a "9-figure" valuation meaning at least $100 million, Ray said, declining to comment on the structure of the round.

The seed round brings aPriori's total funding to $10 million. Last year, the project raised $2 million in pre-seed funding co-led by Hashed and Arrington Capital. At the time, it was building a maximal extractable value (MEV) project related to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain ecosystem but later decided to focus exclusively on the Monad blockchain ecosystem, Ray said.

Earlier Thursday, another Monad liquid staking protocol, Kintsu, raised $4 million in seed funding from Brevan Howard Digital, Castle Island Ventures, and others.

What is aPriori?

aPriori was founded last year by Ray, a Jump Crypto and Pyth Data Association alum, and Olivia Z, a Coinbase alum. It is building an MEV-powered liquid staking platform on the Monad blockchain, combining both staking and MEV rewards. MEV refers to the extra value that can be extracted from block production by optimizing the ordering of transactions beyond the standard block reward and gas fees. aPriori will provide an efficient MEV marketplace that reduces spamming and increases validator incentives on Monad, Ray said.

The Monad blockchain has yet to launch its mainnet. Ray said that once the mainnet is live sometime this year, users can stake their Monad tokens with aPriori, earn rewards, and receive a liquid stake pool token that they can use across other DeFi applications.

"We have strong relationships within Monad's ecosystem and its builders, with protocols committing to leverage our liquid staking token (LST) going into Monad's mainnet," Ray said. aPriori has yet to decide on a ticker for its LST.

aPriori launch timeline

aPriori will 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, Ray said. Monad is currently live on a private internal devnet. As for aPriori's own token launch, Ray said there is no timeline yet.

aPriori currently employs 14 people globally and is looking to hire more for the engineering function, Ray said.

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