Ethereum L2 on Near
One major roadblock in crypto’s transition towards a multi-chain ecosystem is the difficulty of developing applications across blockchains with different development environments. For instance, developers that have launched a project on Ethereum who also wish to launch on another blockchain must refactor their smart contracts from Solidity to the other blockchain’s language and must also consider an entirely new set of technological vulnerabilities. These difficulties have led many developers to focus on a single blockchain to deploy their applications, creating complex trade-offs between things like asset liquidity, size of their user base, and transaction speeds & scalability.
Aurora is a new Ethereum-compatible developer platform built on top of the NEAR Protocol. Aurora allows developers to easily port Solidity smart contracts from Ethereum and launch them with NEAR’s more scalable infrastructure, offering close to 1s blocktimes and $0.01 transaction fees. The project is composed of two major components:
Aurora Engine: an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that allows Ethereum smart contracts (and many Ethereum developer tools) to run on top of NEAR
Aurora Bridge: a trustless protocol to transfer ERC20 tokens and ETH between Aurora and Ethereum, as a part of NEAR’s broader Rainbow Bridge
Aurora is also building out several additional features to further streamline application development between NEAR and Ethereum, including a bridge to transfer NFTs, price oracles, data indexers, AMMs, and more.
Several incredibly popular projects on Ethereum have already announced and begun efforts to launch on Aurora, including 1inch (a DEX aggregator), DODO (a cross-chain DEX), Aave (a non-custodial liquidity protocol), Curve (an AMM), SushiSwap (a DEX), and Etherscan (a blockchain explorer).
Aurora was built by former members of the NEAR Protocol team, which spun out as an independent entity called Aurora Labs in July of this year. The project’s governance has been decentralized with the AuroraDAO, comprised of holders of the $AURORA governance token. The AuroraDAO maintains the project and includes a council that votes on high-level changes to Aurora that are then executed by subordinate organizations.
Ultimately, Aurora both enhances the capabilities of dapps on Ethereum by allowing them to access NEAR’s more efficient infrastructure and helps expand the NEAR Ecosystem with the launch of several popular Ethereum-based projects on NEAR, bringing crypto as a whole closer to the vision of a seamless cross-chain future.
The Fragmentation of a Multi-Chain Universe
A key roadblock in crypto’s transition towards a seamless multi-chain future is the difficulty of developing applications across numerous different blockchains, many of which have vastly different machine specifications and programming paradigms. As an example, most dapps and DeFi protocols today initially launch on the Ethereum network, which uses smart contracts written in Solidity.
A web2 analog of this problem might be the different software development suites for different mobile operating systems. For many years, mobile apps for iOS were exclusively developed with Apple’s iOS SDK, while mobile apps for Android were exclusively developed with Google’s Android SDK. This meant that resource-strapped developers often had to choose between one or the other, creating an asymmetric distribution of mobile apps between the two platforms. Today, the problem of developing simultaneously for both iOS and Android has largely been solved by frameworks like React Native, which allow developers to write a single codebase that can build and run on either platform. For web3 to see a similar level of platform-agnostic technologies, it’s imperative to build tools that make it easier for developers to build and deploy applications across different blockchains.
What’s the solution?
One approach to making cross-chain development significantly easier is as follows: instead of building multiple implementations of the same application for different blockchains, we can build infrastructure-level components to allow code that runs on one particular blockchain to also run on others. The popularity of Ethereum makes this particularly compelling, as Solidity has emerged as a “gold standard” of sorts for smart contract development; developers are often inclined to start with Solidity implementations of their ideas, given Ethereum’s massive user base and the widespread availability of Solidity resources online. Infrastructure that “translates” or emulates Solidity code on other blockchains is then a no-brainer, as it allows other blockchains to easily access the vast ecosystem of dapps and protocols that have been built on Ethereum.
What is Aurora?
Aurora is an Ethereum-compatible developer platform built on top of the NEAR Protocol. With Aurora, developers can easily deploy smart contracts from Ethereum onto NEAR to take advantage of an impressive 1s block time, 2s finality, and gas fees below a cent per transaction thanks to NEAR’s infrastructure. Aurora users can build applications with a developer experience much like that of Ethereum 1.0, while simultaneously accessing levels of speed and scalability comparable to what’s promised by Ethereum 2.0. You can learn more about the NEAR Protocol here.
Though Aurora operates as an independent entity, the project was built by members of the NEAR team itself and includes CEO Alex Schvchenko, who previously led various Ethereum-related initiatives at NEAR, CTO Arto Bendiken, a prolific open-source developer, and Joshua Bouw, who played a key role in the development of Proof-of-Stake consensus.
How does Aurora work?
Aurora enables developers to launch Ethereum apps on NEAR through two key offerings:
Aurora Engine: a high-performance Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that runs on NEAR, which essentially emulates the development experience and computational procedures of Ethereum. Ethereum developers can easily begin development on Aurora simply by modifying the RPC endpoints for their smart contract tools (IDEs, wallets, etc.). Developers can also access many of Ethereum’s popular developer tools, such as Hardhat and Truffle, on Aurora Engine to further enhance their workflow. Moreover, the base token on the Aurora Engine is ETH itself, further aligning the user experiences of dapps on Ethereum and Aurora.
Aurora Bridge: a trustless protocol to transfer ETH and ERC20 assets between Ethereum and Aurora, enabling an even more seamless integration between corresponding Ethereum and Aurora projects. The Aurora Bridge is a part of NEAR’s broader Rainbow Bridge, which now allows for seamless and trustless transfer of assets between Ethereum, NEAR, and Aurora. You can read more about the Rainbow Bridge and its trustless approach here.
The Aurora team is also partnering with several Ethereum ecosystem projects to launch several additional capabilities for its development environment, including a bridge to transfer NFTs between NEAR and Ethereum, prices oracles, data indexers, an automated market maker (AMM), and more. You can see a more fleshed out roadmap here.
Several incredibly popular projects on Ethereum have already announced and begun efforts to launch on Aurora, including 1inch (a DEX aggregator), DODO (a cross-chain DEX), Aave (a non-custodial liquidity protocol), Curve (an AMM), SushiSwap (a DEX), and Etherscan (a blockchain explorer).
How is the project maintained?
Holders of the $AURORA governance token can participate in the AuroraDAO, which is the decentralized governing body for the project. The AuroraDAO includes a “Council” that votes on high-level changes or upgrades to Aurora, which are then executed by subordinate organizations. The council initially consists of Aurora Labs and a set of early investors like Pantera and ecosystem partners like 1inch. The council has already voted on several proposals, including one to add Etherscan to the council and another to approve the creation of an $AURORA governance token.
Final Thoughts
As blockchains grow increasingly diverse in their features and programming paradigms, the need for better tools for cross-chain development is becoming more and more pronounced. Particularly as Ethereum continues to suffer from abysmal transaction speeds and insane gas fees, creating a poor (and often inaccessible) user experience, developers are increasingly looking for easy solutions to launch their applications on other, more scalable blockchains.
Aurora offers an incredible solution for developers looking to build Ethereum-based applications on the NEAR Protocol, which offers considerably faster and more scalable computation than Ethereum. With its fully-compatible EVM and trustless bridge for transferring assets with Ethereum, Aurora makes it easier than ever for Ethereum developers to port smart contracts to NEAR and launch their applications in the growing NEAR Ecosystem. The demand for such a seamless cross-chain development experience is already being seen, through how many of Ethereum’s most popular projects, like 1inch and Etherscan, have already committed to launching on Aurora. Ultimately, Aurora both enhances the capabilities of dapps on Ethereum by allowing them to access NEAR’s more efficient infrastructure and helps expand the NEAR Ecosystem with the launch of several popular Ethereum-based projects on NEAR, bringing crypto as a whole closer to the vision of a seamless cross-chain future.
- Paul Veradittakit
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ABOUT ME
Hi, I’m Paul Veradittakit, a Partner at Pantera Capital, one of the oldest and largest institutional investors focused on investing in blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies. I’ve been in the industry since 2014, and the firm invests in equity, early stage token projects, and liquid cryptocurrencies on exchanges. I focus on early-stage investments and share my thoughts on what’s going on in the industry in this weekly newsletter.