Aurora Engineering Recap October 2024

Company-wide Updates

ETHWallets on NEAR were released: now you can use your favorite EVM wallet with NEAR blockchain. All you have to do is to onboard here https://welcome-to-near.org/. We have also prepared the instructions on how to integrate it to your NEAR dApp here.

Engine Team

Aurora Engine 3.7.0 (Cancun support) on Testnet: Cancun support has been released on Testnet. Mainnet release will happen late November. We are fully supporting the Execution Layer of Cancun hard fork, new opcodes, etc. You can read more about it here.

We have full coverage of Aurora EVM by Ethereum Tests, more than 130,000 of these. This ensures Aurora’s Ethereum compatibility to the maximum extent. You can check them running here in CI.

Infrastructure Team

EIP-1559 transactions support on relayer: now you can call `eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas` method, which will return 0x0 for you. To remind you, Aurora is more oriented toward the legacy transactions because we don’t have gas auctions – gas price is always constant and equals 0.07GWei right now. We do support 3 types of transactions right now in our EVM contract: legacy, EIP-1559, and EIP-2930.
NEAR Lake is Aurora: Our Request For Proposal for NEAR Lake was accepted by NEAR Foundation. It means that from now on Aurora will take over the NEAR Lake support and development. NEAR Lake is an indexing solution for NEAR Protocol based on Amazon S3.
Free transactions for EVM Wallets on NEAR: team has implemented free transactions on our relayer and added API to get a number of these left. Now, every user gets 10 free transactions a day on NEAR Protocol while using EVM Wallets.

Security Team

Bug Bounties Yearly Report has been published, and you can read the full post on our forum here. The most rewarded bounties were “Testnet Configuration leak” ($2000) and ”Subtraction underflow, balance, and gas overflows in XCC” ($3500). Please join the hacking at our Bug Bounties Program at HackenProof.
New Bug Bounty Reports:
- Open Port vulnerability on one of our sites, received in Discord.
- Cache poisoning in one of the UI frameworks we are using.
  
  Both issues were fixed and rewarded.
Relayer Tests: the team has covered our RPC endpoints with the tests to continuously ensure Mainnet is working up to standards. We execute them continuously to monitor the state of the network. You can take a look at the repository here.
Security CI Workflows for our products were implemented. We have finished with the process of inventorization: declaring "software components" in our repos so that our software catalog can store metadata about them. And based upon that, we now have a shared security workflow that performs static analysis on our products. We use Slither, Clippy, go-vet, and staticcheck to do this.
The repository is public, so you can take a look here. You can find an example of applying this workflow with the Near Intents project at this repo’s CI.

Product Team

REDACTED Conference:
- Virtual chains presentation: our CEO, Alex Shevchenko, gave a presentation about why virtual chains are better than existing L2 solutions to start your own chain.
- Near Intents Demo: Alex also talked about Intents Layer on NEAR enabling the AI agents communication and already fueling the UX of crosschain DEX on NEAR.
- Aurora hackathon bounty: we received 29 hackathon submissions and have chosen our 3 winners. You can read more about them in this post.
Create Aurora App npm package: we have released an npm package to help you start building your dApp on Aurora. You can easily bootstrap two kinds of projects there – for writing the smart contracts or writing a Wagmi-based dApp. It is fully base on our dApp documentation examples.
The Beta Testers Club has started, please join us here, and earn some money while making our products better.

Apps Team

Aurora Pass:

Support ETH Wallets on NEAR: now you can send your NEP-141 tokens to EVM addresses on NEAR and see the corresponding transaction history.
Redesign of the landing page: we have redesigned the AuroraPass landing page with respect to the latest version updates.

Aurora Cloud Console

Preparing DevNet chain for public access: DevNet will be a chain where developers will be able to test the virtual chain development by themselves. It will have all of the integrations enabled (add-ons like Oracle, Bridge, On-ramp, etc.), so you can try using all of these. DevNet is a production ready chain – with real value and real tokens inside of it. The release is planned for late November.
Finished up with the redesign: Bridge configuration, Fiat onramp, Universal Widget pages were added.
Onramp widget with Munzen: we enable on-ramp and off-ramp from the same widget for any virtual chain.

About Aurora

Aurora is a network of Virtual Chains that combines NEAR’s scalability with powerful infrastructure for the easy deployment of preconfigured blockchains. By integrating a high-performance EVM, the trustless Rainbow Bridge, and advanced Cross Contract Call technology, Aurora goes beyond full Ethereum compatibility, opening the doors to a multichain world.