Aurora & Aurora+ Important Updates
Aurora Labs' CEO, Alex Shevchenko, just announced major Aurora updates at NEARCON 2022.
This week starts off strong for Aurora - with our participation in NEARCON 2022 and our CEOs keynote announcing a number of really exciting new features incoming or already live on the Aurora network.
While we’ve historically announced new developments on our weekly Alpha Leaks livestream, this week we’re very excited and thus impatiently waiting to be announcing the next iteration of Aurora+ and a number of important developments to the Aurora network.
Aurora+ Updates
Starting off slowly, we’re pleased to announce a makeover of the Aurora+ dashboard, now offering complete access to the entire Aurora ecosystem, clearer staking interface as well as a number of new features such as:
Aurora+ Swaps
Aurora+ Swaps is now live and can be accessed through Aurora+, allowing you to easily swap on the Aurora network or bridge directly from Ethereum and NEAR before swapping. It's an instant crypto exchange and the easiest place to swap tokens on Aurora. Give it a show right now here
Aurora+ Fiat On-Ramp
Our fiat gateway is now live and it allows you to top-up your Aurora+ account with fiat in an easy and secure manner directly from within the new Aurora+ dashboard with any VISA or Mastercard!
Aurora+ Referral Program
To help promote awareness of the benefits and the great user experience of Aurora+, we’re excited to announce the Aurora+ Referral Program! Each Aurora+ account holder will now find a unique referral link within their Aurora+ Dashboard which can be shared with others. For every friend that you refer who stakes 100 AURORA, we’ll reward both of you with 10 AURORA. Read more about it here.
Important developments to the Aurora network
Rainbow Bridge NEAR-native token connector
The Rainbow Bridge NEAR-native token connector is now live, announcing a new era in compatibility and connectivity between NEAR and Ethereum. With this launch, users will now be able to bridge any NEAR-native token to the Ethereum network!
Engine 2.7.0 and Aurora Cross-Contract calls
With the announcement of the Aurora Engine 2.7.0 several days ago, we would now like to announce the launch of cross-contract calls on Aurora which introduces several new capabilities such as interoperability with NEAR, interoperability with JS, Octopus Network, Calimero and anything else that will be created in the future.
For the end user, this ultimately translates into the ability to interact with any NEAR dApp directly from within Aurora.
Aurora MEV
The Aurora MEV program essentially recognizes the value of a managed mempool-like environment, open for everyone, allowing for multiple opportunities to extract value, making the network more secure and protecting against failing transactions due to network spam.
The current setup is suboptimal with bots spamming the network and together with the low-network fees create an environment where many extractable value opportunities fail as transactions.
A managed MEV flow will now reduce post-block production spam and in the same time decrease incentives for Sybil attacks. Furthermore, we’re happy,together with our partner Kolibr.io (who develops BEV Relay solutions), to now create an open and competitive market for order-flow payment and take steps towards conserving the value inside the ecosystem itself - value which grows exponentially as the market moves towards the green.
Solidity cross-compilation into WASM
As with cross-contract calls, the new version of the Aurora engine also brings the next new step in the Aurora network’s evolution.
Our roadmap’s top priority was always a high performance EVM - and work towards that roadmap means we want, nay - we need to compile ahead of time (AOT) into WebAssembly instead of EVM byte-code (which then needs to further be interpreted into WASM).
However, we would like to announce that Aurora can now store already precompiled WASM code, essentially allowing you to build with Solidity directly on NEAR. We think this is quite huge, as it essentially adds NEAR support for arguably one of the most popular blockchain development languages - Solidity.
One last note
Lastly, we’re going to end on a positive note - if the above wasn’t enough, the next big thing for Aurora in terms of mass adoption and scalability is just around the corner!
With this, let’s finally move towards mass adoption! Don’t forget to stay in touch as usual, through aurora.dev, our Twitter or Discord, or by joining the discussion on our forum.