Frequently asked questions
You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers.
Use the Rainbow Bridge 2.0 to transfer tokens between Ethereum, NEAR and Aurora!
Aurora was built by the same team that created the NEAR Protocol, considered to be among the most highly regarded blockchain technologies in the crypto space. Although created at NEAR, Aurora will exist as an independent concern, governed by the decentralized AuroraDAO, and will leverage the unique underlying NEAR technologies to align incentives of the network, product owners, and end users. When you choose to deploy your app on Aurora, you’re partnering with a highly-capable and dedicated organization, and building upon a technical foundation that will scale to meet all your future needs.
The base fee token of Aurora is ETH, which will make your users feel right at home. By leveraging the underlying low-cost capabilities of the NEAR Protocol, Aurora transactions will typically cost pennies. What’s particularly interesting, is that the underlying fee model of NEAR opens the door to innovative possibilities, such as AuroraDAO directed mechanisms of channeling a portion of collected fees back to the projects running on Aurora!
Aurora is a major use case for the NEAR blockchain that requires many changes on different levels. At the moment we’re waiting for NEAR validators to accept the protocol change that will add EVM precompiles. We expect this to happen in the first half of the summer. After this protocol upgrade one can expect Aurora to be able to host twice the throughput of the Ethereum mainnet. There’s still a lot of room for a single-shard Aurora improvement, so we expect further throughput increases.
While you can find the detailed Aurora roadmap here, in general, over the course of Summer we plan to optimise Aurora and take care of the DAO formation and token development (if this is decided by the DAO). In Autumn, we plan to deliver several major features, such as introduction of fast bridging of the most popular tokens, ability to pay fees in stablecoins and simplified UX for non-blockchain users. We’re planning to deliver a sharded version of Aurora early next year.