Aurora

Aurora is the platform which provides Ethereum Layer-2 Experience on NEAR Protocol. Aurora allows NEAR developer to extend their dApps to Ethereum marketplace, while taking advantage of cheap gas fee by NEAR, and other advantages.

Aurora are made of two components:

  • Aurora Engine allowing seamless deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts, and
  • Aurora Bridge (essentially a Rainbow Bridge specialized for this task).

Aurora enhancements compared to Ethereum:

  • Fees are up to 1000x lower than Ethereum's.
  • Thousands of transactions per second (tps), which is 50x more than Ethereum 1.0.
  • Aurora transaction finality is 2 seconds (same as NEAR) compared to Ethereum's 13s; significantly reducing risk of frontrunning attacks.
  • Ecosystem growth on Aurora is future-proof: sharding approach provides horizontal EVM scaling, with asynchronous communication between multiple Aurora shards.
  • Greener option for ethereum user: PoS than PoW.

Aurora is implemented as a smart contract on the NEAR blockchain. It implements two main interfaces: Execution and Token.

  • Execution interface allows users to send ordinary Ethereum transactions; they get decoded, verified, and executed in the EVM runtime. Some operations may be moved to NEAR Protocol level (and thus become precompiles) in case a smart contract doesn't deliver the target performance.
  • Token: permissionless token bridging with Rainbow Bridge technology.

Some discussion proposes transferring ETH over the Aurora Bridge to NEAR Protocol, such that users can deposit and withdraw ETH to NEAR. The outcome is: NEAR EVM runtime will use bridged ETH (nETH) as a base token.

Aurora runs on top of NEAR, so NEAR gas is the real measure of computational work. However, for compatibility with Ethereum, users can pay their transactions with ether (ETH). Aurora infrastructure includes relayers to encapsulate ordinary EVN transactions into NEAR transactions, submit them on-chain, and return the transaction result.

Look at the doc's FAQ for more info.

Resources

  • https://near.org/blog/aurora-launches-near/
  • https://doc.aurora.dev/
  • https://doc.aurora.dev/compat/gas