TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Aurora has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Aurora.
In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Aurora ecosystem, answer all the $AURORA related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Aurora!
What is Aurora (AURORA)?
Aurora is the compatibility department of NEAR protocol. Started originally by a core team of NEAR developers, Aurora is helping build bridges to other ecosystems and accelerating the adoption and decentralization of NEAR.
Aurora consists of two core components: the Aurora Engine runtime, which allows for the seamless deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts, and the Aurora Bridge (based on the Rainbow Bridge technology), providing for the permissionless transfer of tokens and data between Ethereum and Aurora.
Aurora is implemented as a smart contract on the NEAR protocol rather than a monolithic blockchain. This makes it similar to a Layer-2 scalability solution, with the difference that transactions are validated directly on the NEAR protocol.
NEAR has been created with the goal of being an alternative to Ethereum. Ethereum has been created in 2014 and introduced the concepts of smart contracts. These are small applications that run inside a virtual machine called the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
The EVM allows for a blockchain to process more than simple token transfers. To give more info, it opened up the possibility to run applications in a decentralized manner. Applications usually run in the cloud or on your computer, so running them on a blockchain was unheard of at the time.
This makes them uncensorable (nobody can stop them) and ensures they’re always online — as long as the chain they run on is processing transactions. Aurora has created an EVM architecture that helps developers to deploy Ethereum-native dapps on NEAR.
The concept of blockchains is not new, and NEAR is one of many such networks. The idea started in 2008 with the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper. This kicked off the subsequent creation of many different types of networks under the same “blockchain” terminology.
Despite being similar in concept blockchains have all different architectures and use cases. What all have in common — including NEAR — is that they have to be secure.
Security is the ability of a blockchain to prevent attacks and penalize malicious actors. This is usually done through their consensus algorithm and the mechanism they use to reach finality. Over time many different mechanism have been designed, ranging from Proof of Work, Proof of Stake to novel ones called Proof of Spacetime. Each one hopes to achieve the best way of securing the network they are built for.
NEAR makes use of type of consensus mechanism we call “Thresholded Proof of Stake” — or TPoS for short. Deploying to NEAR comes with several advantages. This is because the NEAR protocol is able to scale faster than its counterpart. Scalability is defined as the network’s ability to support increasingly more transactions and nodes.
NEAR achieves scalability by implementing a technique called “sharding.” It involves breaking up the blockchain into smaller parts with different validators working on them, which regularly communicate with one another.
Ethereum is already working on implementing the concept of sharding, but NEAR went ahead. The protocol is currently operating with one shard, and the current throughput is around 2000 transactions per second (TPS). In its final form, NEAR will be able to support 100,000 TPS.
Developers who deploy their dapps via Aurora inherit the same scalability of the underlying NEAR protocol. Aurora fees are up to 1,000x lower than Ethereum’s. For example, the cost of transferring a ERC-20 token is below $0.01, while for Ethereum it’s around $5.40.
Aurora is able to host thousands of transactions per second, representing an increase of 50x compared to Ethereum in its current state. Finality is achieved when a block has been created and is now immutable, meaning that nobody can change the date inside.
For Aurora, finality is achieved within one second, compared to Ethereum’s block confirmation time of 13 seconds. Also, fast finality of NEAR blockchain reduces significantly the risk of front-running attacks.
Besides the EVM, Aurora developed the Rainbow Bridge which allows users to transfer assets between Ethereum, NEAR, and Aurora. Thus Aurora becomes a point of connection for Ethereum and NEAR economies.
One of the most notable design decisions is the use of ETH as the base currency within Aurora, for the payment of transaction fees. While a lot of the Ethereum layer 2s require users and developers to acquire the L2’s native tokens, Aurora wants to offer a straightforward, seamless experience for users and developers from the Ethereum community.
Under the hood, Rainbow Bridge has a complex structure, as it requires Aurora to hold a constant balance of both NEAR and ETH. On the user’s side, they are just paying ETH to the protocol, while in fact it is the NEAR token which is used for the fees. Validators are just mediating the conversion between cryptocurrencies making it look seamless.
The Aurora Bridge technical architecture is designed to be “trustless”, meaning there’s no reliance on third-parties for authorizations. Trustless transfers align with the ethos of decentralized finance, but do require more time, given that network confirmations to ensure transaction finality.
As a security measure, transactions on Aurora take about 10 minutes, and transfers back to Ethereum take about a day. The team plans to dramatically improve those transfer times and gradually support more assets for bridging to Aurora.
For more details about how you can earn more Aurora by running a validator node at home check out our Aurora Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $AURORA in 2024 and beyond.
When was Aurora (AURORA) created?
Aurora (AURORA) was created by the team at NEAR in 2021. Work began on the Aurora network in 2020, but before that, a couple of important events happened. Most events revolve around the Aurora CEO and Founder, Alex Shevchenko.
The first meaningful event is Shevchenko’s contact to the crypto industry. According to Alex, he got into crypto by accident. One day, as he was working on his PhD, he visited a vacancy fair at the university. A booth that caught his eye was the BitFury. It was something about immersion coding technology and it happened to be BitFury, a well known crypto mining company. He was told how BitFury is working on building a logic data center for mining bitcoins.
Before the presentation, Alex had heard about Bitcoin frugally, from internet articles and casual internet conversations. He had no knowledge of how the Bitcoin protocol worked, despite having studied computer systems. At the time, Bitcoin was trading for a little over $250 and the takedown of the infamous Silk Road were still echoing in the crypto community. It was something else that made Alex want to apply to BitFury.
In his own words: “Noting that I was what some refer to as the classic, extremely eager A-level student, they said the best thing to say to a person like that if you want to get their attention: We have a very complicated test for all applicants and only about 1% actually end up getting the job. You can give it a go if you want but don’t expect much.”
Alex was eager to take the challenge, and surprise surprise, he was accepted. He ended up being one of the first hires at BitFury in the software department. Alex was tasked with building permissioned blockchains. The result of his work was a blockchain called “Exonum”, which brings a full set of blockchain features to businesses and governments.
Another meaningful event was reuniting with his old colleague, the founder of NEAR, Illia Poloushkin. According to Alex, they were both in the same middle school. Alex was one year older than Illia, and they had similar interests in mathematics. Their path intersected during math olympics and different competitions.
As years went by, they kept in touch, but no collaboration would come up until years later. While researching crypto projects in the industry, Illia stumbled upon Exonum. He then realized that one of his upper classmates is from there, so they connected to talk about Exonum. From there, they both started working on blockchain solutions together. After several discussions, they’ve realized that the industry needs more blockchain bridges.
In 2018, monolithic blockchains were still a hot topic, as people though it was a “winner takes all” type of competition. Suffice to say, the movement for implementing bridges was just starting to catch up. Though it was still a long way from the bridge standards we are used to seeing today.
Driven by the lack of infrastructure, they were looking to create an efficient bridge that could help NEAR reach networks like Ethereum. The first version of the bridge was designed during the San Francisco Hackathon.
By 2019, the team at NEAR was already making progress with the bridge, and they were in the process of building an EVM for NEAR. The problem was that NEAR had no leader in charge of the project. At this point, there were two separate teams working on the bridge and the EVM.
They needed someone to take the code from GitHub, market the product and bring users to the platform. Illia realized while talking to Alex about all these challenges that he’s the perfect candidate to lead the project. In 2020 he joined NEAR, and this is where his career has taken a new direction.
The bridge and EVM were 90% done at this point, so all Alex had to was to apply the finishing touches, such as checking the code and managing the audits. Alex had been working at NEAR for 4 months before Illia decided to nominate him as the CEO of this separate project called “Aurora.”
The creation of Aurora embodied a bridge and EVM compatible with NEAR. In the words of Illia Poloushkin, Aurora is considered to be a compatibility department of the NEAR network. With Aurora being founded, the team decided to build everything from scratch, with new learnings from the previous proof of concepts.
The rebuilding of Aurora took four months before the protocol was officially launched. Shortly after the launch, Aurora was a tremendous success. The bridge was responsible for 80% of the load on NEAR.
Because NEAR was still running on one shard, its scaling capabilities were still limited. This caused Aurora to be the first project to hit the performance limits of NEAR at the time. Later on, the team spun out into Aurora Labs and launched the $AURORA token.
The $AURORA token was sold only through a private sale first, and then a public one. The private sale brought in $12 million worth of funds to accelerate the growth of Aurora Labs. The next sale was a massive success, bringing in $13 million from retail investors. Such a huge investment has allowed Aurora to continue building the vision of an onboarding tool for all existing Ethereum developers.
Who created Aurora (AURORA)?
Aurora was created by Alex Shevchenko in collaboration with the team from NEAR. Alex Shevchenko is a technical and product manager born in Ukraine. He worked as an executive at BitFury and now serves as the CEO of Aurora Labs.
Alex created Aurora with help from Arto Bendiken, Frank Braun, Joshua J. Bouw and Marcelo Fornet. They work on the underlying protocol that powers NEAR before branching out to Aurora.
Alex Shevchenko started his studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 2006. After graduating, Alex pursued his PhD in Applied Physics and Mathematics at the same university.
In his pre-blockchain career, he was focusing on studying parallel massive computation using heterogeneous architectures. In essence, heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processors. Alex figured out that blockchains are faced with the same challenge: how to make sure that many different computers are actually executing instructions as a single system.
He previously worked on Bitfury, one of the biggest Bitcoin mining farms. During his 4 years stay at Bitfury, Alex was in charge of building permissioned blockchains. One of his most important projects was Exonum, a permissioned blockchain architecture for enterprises.
At the time, Exonum was one of the first blockchain implementations in a programming language called Rust. His work on Exonum was used later on by NEAR, who applied two of the project’s libraries to their blockchain. From 2018 until 2020, Shevchenko worked as the CEO Business Assistant for Bitfury. In 2020, Alex joined the NEAR team where he met his future colleagues.
Arto Bendiken was hired in 2020 as the Technical Lead for NEAR’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) working group. When the group spun out as Aurora Labs, Arto was appointed the CTO of the project. His previous experience in blockchain didn’t start with NEAR, however.
In 2015, Arto was appointed Master Toolsmith of the Cypherpunk Division at Crypto Economics Consulting Group. His duties revolved around building tooling and analytics for smart contracts. In parallel, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Makalu Interactive, a digital company that serves customers like Google and Virgin America. Arto is a prolific open-source author with 20 years of professional software engineering experience under his belt.
Joshua J. Bouw joined NEAR as a Senior Engineer in 2021. He previously worked at Cardinal Cryptography as a Senior Protocol Developer. Joshua J. Bouw is heralded as “The Godfather of Proof of Stake” for his early role in the development of Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms.
In 2013, he closely followed the early days of Peer Coin — the first hybrid proof of work and proof of stake project. He was one of the first advocates for 100% proof of stake models. Joshua also worked with the founder of Blackcoin, the world’s first 100% proof of stake cryptocurrency. During these early days of Proof of Stake, Joshua and other early crypto pioneers did a number of world first’s for the crypto industry: the first multi-pool, the first on-chain smart contract.
Fast forward to 2020, Joshua discovered NEAR through his personal work. He started working on the NEAR EVM Team with Arto Bendiken and Frank Braun, before transitioning on the role of Team Manager at Aurora Labs.
Frank Braun Joined NEAR upon Arto’s recommendation, where he worked as a part-time contractor focused on testing and benchmarking for the EVM Team. He describes himself as a Computer Scientist, Crypto-Anarchist, and Privacy Advocate.
Frank first stumbled upon the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2011 and was intrigued by the idea, which led him to dig deeper into the concept of blockchains.
Being a long-time crypto-anarchist, Frank is a strong advocate for libertarian values. He has a PhD in Computer Science and started out his career as a teaching assistant and researcher. Frank Braun currently serves as the head of security at Aurora Labs.
In 2019, NEAR’s EVM tech team had been working on its first iteration. According to the founder of NEAR, the EVM was a promising proof of concept. However, the team was not ready to launch the version.
In 2020, when Alex Shevchenko joined NEAR, they put together a strategy to polish the product and promote it to the users. So they’ve decided to rebuild the protocol from the ground up and establish it as a separate project from NEAR. After four months of intensive development, Aurora was born.
Besides developing the EVM, NEAR’s core developer team wanted to create a smart contract that would bridge NEAR to other blockchains. The team’s vision was to create a tool that allowed assets to exist on both NEAR and Ethereum, creating a multi-chain Web3 user experience. To do this, the team designed a bridge that was completely decentralized: anyone could use it, anywhere, and at any time—without permission.
The culmination of their work was the Rainbow Bridge. Some of NEAR’s core team branched out to join Aurora—a project that now offers the bridge and and the NEAR EVM.
How is the Aurora (AURORA) token used?
The AURORA token is the native token for the Aurora platform. Most blockchains have their own native token, which is used as the de-facto currency within their ecosystems. We sometimes refer to it as “gas”. Its primary use case is securing the network and keeping actors aligned to the same principles.
However, Aurora isn’t a blockchain — it is a smart contract built on NEAR protocol. The default unit for transactions on Aurora is currently denominated in ETH. Making a transaction on Aurora requires a small fee in ETH, usually around $0.01.
Because Aurora strives to be fully decentralized, the team has created its own governance token and DAO structure. AURORA has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. The token was deployed on Ethereum and bridged to to NEAR and Aurora using the Rainbow Bridge.
All supply is planned to be unlocked by month 132 from Token Generation Event on November 18, 2021. Besides its use case as a governance token, AURORA also serves as the funding mechanism for dapps built on Aurora.
Recently, Aurora has announced the release of Aurora+, a new membership program. Aurora+ is leveraging the traditional subscription model and applies it to the bridge users. Available today, all Aurora users can sign up for a free Basic account, including 50 free transactions per month and increased benefits from staking their AURORA tokens.
Initially, bridging costs have been covered by the team to encourage adoption. However, Aurora went a step further by creating a plan that fits every user’s needs. With the addition of Aurora+, users will gain a seat in the AuroraDAO, have the option for private transactions, and optional KYC for dapps within Aurora’s ecosystem.
The paid subscription model has been created to ensure the sustainability of the services offered by Aurora. While the details about Aurora+ remain scant for now, the team plans to add more and more features to the membership program.
Aurora is currently listed on multiple exchanges. The major ones are Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.
If you want to skip ahead and learn how to earn more Aurora by running a validator node at home check out our Aurora Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $AURORA in 2024 and beyond.
Who is developing Aurora (AURORA) now?
Development on Aurora started in 2019 by a team who later spun out into Aurora Labs. After validating their idea, Alex Shevchenko and his team at NEAR created Aurora Labs.
Aurora Labs is a company founded in 2021 that handles the development of the Rainbow Bridge and the NEAR EVM. Despite operating as an independent entity, Aurora Labs is aligned to the strategy of NEAR and most of its team members were initially working at NEAR.
As of 2022, the Aurora team has 49 listed members, ranging from engineers to researchers and marketing specialists. The company is actively seeking to hire for technical and non-technical positions such as: blockchain engineer, Web3 designer, content manager, and head of marketing. Besides handling the development of the core protocol, it is also tasked with growing the ecosystem of Aurora, and promoting the platform at public events.
The codebase of the Rainbow Bridge and the EVM has been previously written by the NEAR team. The code, however, is publicly available and can be used by anyone as the Aurora Labs encourages developers to do.
Open source contributors are also important, as they help build bridges from Aurora to popular blockchains. Notably, the first contribution from an external team was a bridge to BNB Chain. However, the codebase of Aurora remains sacred ground, and only the core team is responsible for implementing it.
Every proposed upgrade is implemented by the Aurora Labs after the community votes on the proposal. The AuroraDAO utilizes SputnikDAO, which was borrowed from NEAR’s framework of operations. Currently, AuroraDAO includes NEAR and Ethereum ecosystem representatives, as well as early Aurora investors.
Governance is done on-chain, and one of the most important prerogatives token holders have is over the DAO Treasury. 200 million AURORA tokens have been allocated to the community treasury and 26 million AURORA tokens have been allocated for ongoing grant programs.
As of 2022, more than 160 Dapps have deployed on NEAR using Aurora, with 46 others to deploy soon. Part of the success is due to the fact that AuroraDAO is heavily invested in growing the ecosystem.
Aurora’s grants mechanism has evolved into a more decentralized funding system. This is because Aurora offers an EVM service, and projects are tempted to take a lazy approach towards their product. According to Alex Shevchenko, many projects would copy the codebase from a popular Ethereum dapp and the immediately apply for grants. Therefore, builders of such projects would be tempted to sell their grant and walk away from the project without providing any value.
As a remedy, Aurora grants would be distributed in a system similar to Kickstarter (current version of the name for it is Jet). Projects that apply for the grants have to build their project from the ground up, and set milestones for their achievements.
Funding is gradually unlocked as they complete the milestones, and token holders would vote every time to unlock more funding. In addition to funding decisions, AuroraDAO is also responsible for improvement proposals. This section is usually reserved for members with a higher technical knowledge and the proposals need to be reviewed by the technical committee before they pass.
What are the latest updates on Aurora (AURORA)?
Aurora in 2021
2021 was the launch year of Aurora. The project started out by launching its validator on NEAR, which was the first step for enabling its services. Aurora had created two important pieces of infrastructure: the Rainbow Bridge and the EVM Runtime.
In the beginning, Aurora didn’t charge any fees to use the Rainbow Bridge — except the gas fees. Their plan was to implement a 9% fee and adjust it based on the demand. Because of the architecture of the Rainbow Bridge, it constantly consumes $NEAR and ETH to keep the networks synchronized. This amount is around 1000 $NEAR and 7 ETH per month, which totals in $30k.
The next step towards decentralization was to launch the AuroraDAO. Their governance system consists of a council of seats, with seat holders being able to vote on proposals that govern the contracts the scaling solution uses.
To begin with, AuroraDAO includes NEAR and Ethereum ecosystem representatives, as well as Aurora investors. Other important council members include representatives from 1Inch, imToken, Infura, Etherscan and Aurora Labs themselves. AURORA token holders will periodically vote on the constituency of the Council.
On October 14, Aurora closed its first private round of funding by raising a total of $12 million. Over 100 investors took part in Aurora’s funding round, which was split between the ecosystem and venture capital investors.
Aurora allocated the funds for the development and maintenance of the EVM, as well as the bridges it’s currently operating between Ethereum and NEAR, as well as Ethereum and Aurora. It also allocated funds to expand the team, and speed up product development and improvement.
Shortly after the private round, Aurora raised an additional $13 million from retail investors via an initial decentralized offering (IDO).
With an already functional Rainbow Bridge, Aurora started to work on a second iteration. By the end of the year, Rainbow Bridge 2.0 was launched under a unified domain: rainbowbridge.app. Late in 2021, Aurora Labs partnered with NearPad and Rose to build a bridge to Terra (ouch).
On the UX side, the bridge implementation was simple, secure and scalable. Furthermore, it demonstrated Aurora’s capability to scale.
Other notable partnerships for Aurora have been with The Graph, Flux Protocol, Chainlink and Etherscan. Within a few months after launch, Aurora was the most popular dapp on NEAR and was responsible for about 80% of the network’s load.
Aurora in 2022
The current year has been a powerful one for Aurora. In just two months after Aurora launched its governance token, the price of $AURORA reached a new all-time high of $35.43 on January 16, 2022.
On February 11, Aurora launched its own version of Etherscan, called Aurorascan. Through Aurorascan, users and developers can get access to developer tools and network statistics that provide extended insights into Aurora’s EVM.
On February 25, Aurora engine 2.4.0 was deployed, slowly solving a major gas fee problem, allowing new opportunities for developers and making it way harder to reach the gas fee limit for both users and developers.
It was a small improvement, but the community welcomed it. Over the course of this year, Aurora went on to expand its ecosystem to 45+ dapps. This means 45+ dapps that chose to deploy from Ethereum to Aurora.
On March 15, Aurora celebrated the 1 year anniversary of the Rainbow Bridge. With a total number of 55070 tracked transactions, the bridge had an average 4589 transactions per month, and 151 per day. In total, those transactions resulted in more than $1.13 billion total assets bridged. Moreover, 100,622 users have interacted with Aurora, mostly from the U.S and Vietnam.
On May 17, Aurora announced service called Aurora+, that provides a suite of benefits. It is a membership program that offers users benefits such as monthly free transactions, and grants them a seat at the AuroraDAO. Aurora+ members who stake AURORA will also receive a share of the ecosystem rewards.
On October 12, Aurora participated at the NEARCON 2022 — the biggest NEAR ecosystem event. During the event, Alex Shevchenko and Arto Bendiken aid out the cross chain future that awaits Aurora and NEAR.
Aurora in 2023
In July, Aurora Labs made waves by introducing Aurora Pass, a revolutionary mobile crypto wallet specifically designed for the Aurora networks. The aim of Aurora Pass was to simplify the onboarding process for users and businesses, providing an easy entry point into the Web3 world while prioritizing effectiveness and simplicity.
Through Aurora Pass, businesses could seamlessly transition into the Web3 landscape, streamlining user onboarding, gas fee management, and interactions with decentralized applications on mobile browsers. The paramount focus remained on the safety and security of digital assets throughout this process. By integrating with Aurora Pass, businesses could harness Web3's power and offer their users uncomplicated access to this evolving digital space.
The integration of Aurora Pass provided businesses with effortless access to blockchain capabilities via a universal transaction signer. This facilitation allowed smooth cooperation among various entities, opening up new horizons of experiences for customers. A key feature was the wallet's ability to aggregate assets and transactions, empowering businesses to collaborate and acknowledge assets from other companies. This innovative approach breathed life into loyalty programs within the blockchain realm.
Aurora is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $AURORA without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes.
Learn how to do that in our Aurora Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $AURORA in 2024 and beyond.