Aurora Engineering Updates June 25

Apps Team

Aurora Cloud Marketplace: the apps team has released the marketplace to support better UX for choosing the building blocks for your virtual chain. We have a lot to choose from: AI, DeFi, identity services, oracles, etc. Go to the marketplace and check it out!

Agents Without Masters Hackathon: during Berlin Blockchain Week, builders took on the challenge from Hackbox to create on-chain AI systems using the Aurora stack. Chris Gutkowski was mentoring and judging the projects. Congratulations to the winners – NEAR Predict!

ETH Belgrade participation: Grisha Kair talked about virtual chains in Belgrade, and how you can easily start one in just a few minutes.

Fiat top-up has been implemented for all virtual chains. Now, administrators can buy more transactions for a virtual chain with a credit card in just a few clicks.

NEAR Intents Team

NEAR Intents as Internal Network: the team has created a new recipient for transfers – NEAR Intents, to allow the possibility to make the transfers internally and freely inside the platform itself. You can get your NEAR Intents address by clicking “Reveal address” on your Account Page.

Support Widget is now available at the bottom right corner of the dapp. Feel free to request any kind of support there, and the team will address it.

EVM Team

Refiner with dynamic logic: time to time, we deploy new versions of the engine contract on the NEAR blockchain (it is done for every virtual chain). Therefore, we need to switch these versions of the contract during re-indexing process dynamically. This change is ensuring the correct switching of these versions during re-indexing. Refiner is an indexing tool that allows getting Aurora blocks from the NEAR blocks.

Switching to Aurora SDK: virtual chain managing library and Aurora CLI are using Aurora SDK now. SDK itself has been extended with the new methods. The release of AuroraCLI is going to be in the end of July.

Volumetric fees for Aurora Engine: tokenomics 3.0 allows adding fees onto deposit and withdraw methods of the engine contract on a specific list of tokens for a chosen list of beneficiaries inside the virtual chain or NEAR. In short, we are replacing the buyback and burn model with a buyback and transfer mechanism. The fees will be applied to a specific set of tokens during bridging in or out of the virtual chain. Here are more details about how tokenomics will work.

Infrastructure Team

Nodes snapshots improvement: the team has changed the way of storing and gathering the snapshots for Aurora nodes. Ensuring better data availability on our side.

Blockscout Improvements: investigated and resolved issues with increased traffic from a Blockscout to a virtual chain RPC. Now, Blockscout needs a lot fewer requests to get all of the needed data from a node.

Wrapping Up

That is it for June’s updates! Whether you're building with virtual chains, bridging assets, or using NEAR Intents, we’re making it easier than ever to build powerful, production-ready dApps in the Aurora ecosystem. Stay tuned - more innovation is coming next month!

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.