Aurora is proud to announce its strategic partnership with [BlueBit Finance](https://awesomenear.com/bluebit-finance) to further enhance yield and liquidity farming opportunities on Aurora. BlueBit Finance is a decentralized yield aggregator protocol on Aurora. The protocol is designed to give users with superior UI and UX which is secure, accessible, and efficient in terms of yield farming strategies. This would cater to the growing user base of Aurora with different risk tolerances.

## BlueBit Finance

Blockchain ecosystems have never been so busy. Lending platforms are bustling, DEXs are full of liquidity, and the stablecoin market is booming. BlueBit as a yield aggregator, will serve as a go-to tool for users looking to optimize capital efficiency and resource allocation throughout the ecosystem.

BlueBit will be the first protocol that bring the vote escrow model into Aurora, by locking utility tokens to governance tokens, users will be able to share platform fee rebates, boosted yields, and voting rights for protocol governance. The mechanism is a proven path to effectively solve liquidity problems while aligning users’ goals with platform’s in the long term, so as to solve liquidity problems with traditional DeFi 1.0

Security should always be the first priority for DeFi projects. They have been implementing measures as much as they can to ensure the highest level of security. As we speak, their SC is under review by HashEX, a reputable audit party, and their testnet is ongoing to be able to use user’s feedback about security.

Their ultimate goal is to build a seamless farming suite on Aurora with a complete set of farming tools to accommodate various farming demands. They will start with BlueBit Vault V1, then followed by single-asset vaults, lending, and leveraged farming…

## Explore BlueBit

BlueBit just announced their testnet launch, which has drawn wide attention throughout the ecosystem with positive remarks. The carnival will last 10 days till March 31st. Feel free to explore on their testnet website. You could also expect an upcoming mainnet launch announcement, so be sure to follow @BlueBitFinance

## Why Aurora?

Aurora is the only Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilize the cutting-edge technology of the NEAR Protocol. In just a few months, Aurora has fostered a vibrant ecosystem of DAOs and builders and scaled to over $1 Billion in TVL. BlueBit is thrilled to integrate itself as part of the Aurora ecosystem and help to increase capital efficiency and enhance the revenue for users while reducing the troublesome operation procedures.

Aurora is proud to announce its strategic partnership with BlueBit Finance to further enhance yield and liquidity farming opportunities on Aurora.

Introducing BlueBit: future yield aggregation platform on Aurora

With PembRock Finance’s early token sale now underway, we thought it would be a good time to give you some more info in anticipation of our upcoming release!
 
PembRock Finance is proud to be part of the NEAR blockchain ecosystem, as we not only see its current potential, but also opportunities for further growth as more products get introduced. As the first leveraged yield farming project on NEAR, we hope to play our part in bringing greater liquidity to the blockchain, while rewarding the expanding NEAR community with great rewards!

## What does this mean for farmers?

With PembRock and Ref Finance, farmers can borrow any available coin and create a leveraged position, meaning larger rewards. Lenders can also provide liquidity to these farmers, getting great interest with minimal risk on cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins. Then there is auto reinvesting —PembRock users can get compounded rewards by using auto reinvesting in their positions!
 
As set out in the second milestone on our roadmap, we are integrating with Ref Finance, linking its liquidity and farming pools to our protocol.

## What is Ref Finance?

Ref Finance is a community-driven, expanding set of DeFi products built around a core AMM. It is at once a decentralized exchange, lending platform, synthetic asset issuer, and much more.
 
Ref Finance benefits from the one to two second finality and cheap transactions inherent to the NEAR blockchain (just $0.005 per swap). This puts Ref Finance pretty much on par with centralized exchanges, helping bring greater legitimacy and trust to decentralized finance. 
 
Best of all, NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge to Ethereum means that traders can currently utilize ERC-20 assets from Ethereum on NEAR, with other bridges in development for BSC, Polygon, and Cosmos.

## PembRock and Ref Finance

In the next month, the first token pair from our project will be introduced on Ref Finance, giving greater value for holders of the versatile PEM token. With this integration, we hope to give a boost to Ref Finance and every farmer, while also establishing our credentials as the go-to leveraged yield farming project, even for those who have never transacted on NEAR protocol before.
 
Plenty of more news to come which we will share with you when the time is right, so stay tuned by following our social media:
[@PembrockFi](https://twitter.com/PembrockFi)

With PembRock Finance’s early token sale now underway, we thought it would be a good time to give you some more info in anticipation of our upcoming release!

Farm with PembRock and Ref Finance

NEAR is excited to announce a new partnership with SailGP, one of the world’s fastest-growing sailing events. As part of this ground-breaking multi-year partnership, SailGP will explore the sale of a new team to a DAO launched on the NEAR Protocol – a first-of-its-kind community engagement and activation platform in professional sports.

SailGP’s DAO will fuse professional sports with community-focused engagement, giving fans and crypto natives alike a new way to engage and gain access to their favorite teams, athletes, and related events. 

Under the current SailGP Teams’ Participation Agreement, this new DAO team could join the SailGP starting line-up for Season 4 in 2023.

“We welcome NEAR to the SailGP family and we are looking forward to them participating in the most exciting racing on-water, featuring the world’s best sailors,” SailGP Founder Larry Ellison said.

## How SailGP’s NEAR DAO will work

Like any other DAO, the SailGP team DAO will be a community project. Through proposals, the SailGP team DAO’s community members  will help determine athlete selection, team management, commercialization options, operations, and overall team strategy.

The SailGP DAO will be a big departure from traditional sports team ownership structures. It will help reimagine sports communities, where fans have a say in how teams form and evolve.  

## Other NEAR and SailGP partnership initiatives

SailGP and NEAR will partner for a number of other new and exciting projects to help inspire a new generation of Web3 developers to build on NEAR.

Beyond DAOs, NEAR and SailGP will collaborate on integrated technology and research and development projects in events ticketing, NFT and gaming offerings, and mobile app integration. NEAR will also use SailGP’s global technology platform to develop real-world intellectual property and Web3 applications for fan engagement, data delivery and management, league management, and more. 

NEAR will also create on-site experiences and activations at global SailGP events to help traditional industries transition to Web3 through NEAR’s simple, secure, and scalable blockchain platform. These events will be open to both new and existing NEAR community members. 

“Our mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world, and this partnership is a fantastic example of exactly that,” said Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, the non-for profit entity that oversees development on the NEAR blockchain. 

“We are ushering in a brand-new era of entertainment by combining sports and technology to elevate the fan experience to a level that has never been seen before, and we’re proud to be leading the way alongside a like-minded organization that shares our core values and vision.”

IMG, SailGP’s global agency for sponsorship, media rights and host venue rights, helped facilitate NEAR’s partnership with SailGP. (IMG is part of Endeavor, a strategic investor in SailGP.) 

“This deal presents an exciting opportunity to change how fans can directly influence and participate in the sports they love,” said Mark Shapiro, President of Endeavor. “We are proud to have brokered this ground-breaking partnership which is the culmination of what happens when sport, technology and entertainment collide.”



NEAR is excited to announce a new partnership with SailGP, one of the world’s fastest-growing sailing events.

NEAR and SailGP Partner on Ground-Breaking New Sports DAO

[Sender](https://awesomenear.com/senderwallet), the browser plug-in wallet for NEAR ecosystem, has officially announced a partnership with [Ref Finance](https://awesomenear.com/ref-finance).

Sender has already started the integration with ref.finance and expects to complete it by mid-March. At that time, NEAR users can experience a seamless integration and smooth experience with the browser Wallet and DEX.

Kenny, the founder of Sender Labs, said he is happy to be working with Ref and that the combination of the plug-in Wallet and DEX will allow users to have a better trading experience while keeping their assets safe.

Joe, the Frontend Lead developer of Ref Finance, said that Ref is the largest DEX in the NEAR ecosystem and the first DEX to integrate a browser-based plug-in wallet, with more features in development.

Sender, the browser plug-in wallet for NEAR ecosystem, has officially announced a partnership with Ref Finance.

Sender Announces Partnership With Ref Finance

## Introduction
Aurora is proud to announce our partnership with Rift Finance to help supercharge DAO growth in the NEAR ecosystem. Rift is a novel form of protocol-owned liquidity that empowers DAOs to achieve sustainable liquidity in a single transaction. This deployment to Aurora follows the close of Rift’s $50M capped beta on Ethereum.

## Rift Finance
By rethinking the incentives behind liquidity provisioning, Rift unlocks a new frontier of DAO growth. DAOs can now deploy their governance tokens to significantly deepen liquidity on DEXs without having to give up ownership of their tokens. Liquidity providers will soon have the opportunity to earn double rewards on their NEAR deposits and reduce their risk of impermanent loss.

For Aurora, Rift’s deployment means more sustainable liquidity for the entire ecosystem. By allowing DAOs to control their own token liquidity instead of depleting their treasuries to mercenary capital, Rift unlocks the growth potential of the ecosystem at large. It provides necessary liquidity tooling for DAOs to scale sustainably.

For DeFi users, Rift offers an exciting new use-case for the NEAR native token. In the coming weeks, liquidity providers will be able to use the Rift protocol to double their returns and protect themselves from the downside risk of impermanent loss. LPs will be able to deposit NEAR into any vault containing DAO tokens on Rift. This NEAR will be paired with governance tokens deposited by the DAOs then activated as liquidity in DEXs. For LPs, depositing into a Rift Vault is strictly more profitable and less risky than depositing liquidity into the DEX directly.

For DAOs on Aurora, using the Rift protocol allows them to deepen their token liquidity without having to give up ownership of their tokens like they do with liquidity mining. DAOs deposit their tokens into a Rift Vault. These tokens are paired with $NEAR deposited by liquidity providers and deposited in a DEX to deepen liquidity for the pair. If you are interested in using Rift for your DAO, please submit this form.

## Why Aurora?
Aurora is the only Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilize the cutting-edge technology of the NEAR Protocol. In just a few months, Aurora has fostered a vibrant ecosystem of DAOs and builders and scaled to over $600M in TVL. Rift is excited to be supporting the growth of the Aurora ecosystem by empowering DAOs to control their own liquidity and granting Aurora users access to lucrative yields.

## Enter the Rift
The first cohort of DAOs to launch on Rift in the Aurora ecosystem includes Trisolaris, NearPad, and Flux, with many more to come soon. You can view the live Rift Vaults on the Rift Webapp here. These DAOs will be able to control their own token liquidity using Rift instead of depleting their treasuries to mercenary capital. Announcements will be shared over their Twitter so be sure to follow @RiftFinance on Twitter.

Aurora is proud to announce our partnership with Rift Finance to help supercharge DAO growth in the NEAR ecosystem.

Rift Deploys to Aurora to Help Supercharge DAO Growth

## Lending is NEAR

After months of building, testing, and auditing since the initial announcement, we are excited to share that Burrow, the first lending protocol on NEAR, is finally ready to launch on mainnet.

To celebrate mainnet coming very soon™, Burrow is partnering up with the coveted Mr. Brown project to issue 140 Mr. BRRR NFTs for a very special NFT voucher program.

## Meet Mr. BRRR

A money hungry groundhog at heart, Mr. BRRR knows how borrowing and lending works better than anyone. That is why he brought Burrow to NEAR — to show his fellow hogs how money markets are done.

For this special NFT voucher program, we present to you the Mr. Brown-ified version of Mr. BRRR.

## Terms and Conditions

- There will be a total of 140 Mr. BRRR NFTs issued
- **1 Mr. BRRR NFT = 100 $BRRR** (native token of Burrow)
- Minting goes live every Wednesday for three weeks, starting on March 23rd, 2022. The NFTs will be minted on Paras.
- After minting, the NFTs can be traded on [Paras](https://paras.id/collection/mr-brrr-nft-vouchers-by-burrownftnear)
- After a 1 month trading period, each Mr. BRRR NFT can be redeemed for 100 $BRRR by sending the NFTs to the [Burrow DAO](https://app.astrodao.com/dao/burrow.sputnik-dao.near) — no matter the floor price
- Burrow has a pre-mining period of $BRRR for 1 month from mainnet launch. NFT redeeming will be available soon after $BRRR becomes transferable. (Dates TBA)
- All verfied NFT holders will be deemed an OG in the [Burrow community](https://discord.gg/E6p8mDKp).
- The NFTs redeem period lasts until December 31st, 2022.

## Mint Details

- Mint Price: **5 $NEAR**
- Platform: [Paras (burrownft.near)](https://paras.id/collection/mr-brrr-nft-vouchers-by-burrownftnear)

## Mint Dates

- March 23, 2022 : 1st batch mint (40 editions) + secondary market on Paras
- March 30, 2022: 2nd batch mint (40 editions)
- April 6, 2022: final batch mint (25 editions)
- After $BRRR unlock (TBA)~ December 31, 2022: NFT redeem period

## Distribution

- Non-whitelist Minting: 90
- Burrow Discord Whitelist: 15
- Ref Finance: 20
- Paras: 5
- Mr. Brown: 5
- NEARweek: 5

Join the [Burrow Discord](https://discord.gg/E6p8mDKp) for a chance to win weekly whitelist opportunities. And follow our partners’ Twitter accounts to participate in the Mr. BRRR NFT giveaways!

After months of building, testing, and auditing, we are excited to share that Burrow, the first lending protocol on NEAR, is finally ready to launch on mainnet.

Get a Mr. BRRR NFT Voucher, 100% Buyback Guarantee

We are excited to announce that WePiggy is coming to Aurora, an EVM layer 2 running on NEAR. WePiggy will join the growing ecosystem of DeFi projects building on Aurora, offering a secure, powerful, and user-friendly cross-chain lending protocol to the Aurora and NEAR community.

Aurora is a solution that allows to execute Ethereum contracts in a more performant environment — NEAR blockchain, a modern layer-1 blockchain which is fast (2–3 second transaction finalization), scalable, and carbon neutral.

WePiggy focuses on building an open-source, non-custodial crypto-asset lending market protocol that helps users realize asset appreciation and maximize utilization across many blockchain networks. On the premise of giving priority to funding security, WePiggy actively creates a more diverse lending market, optimizes the execution efficiency of smart contracts, and expands more dimensions of the business logic. Under the WePiggy multi-chain deployment plan, WePiggy is covering Ethereum, OEC, BNB Chain, Polygon, HECO, Arbitrum, Optimism, Moonriver, Harmony, Oasis and innovative public and Layer-2 networks.

## WePiggy + Aurora

WePiggy core development team will propose a specific plan for WePiggy to be deployed on Aurora.
If the governance proposal has been passed, WePiggy will be officially deployed on Aurora and the liquidity mining program will be launched accordingly.

Aurora will contribute to the building of DeFi infrastructures, including trading liquidity, lending liquidity building and price-feed integration, etc. To eliminate the systemic risk of WePiggy protocol as much as possible.

Aurora will also provide its marketing resource to WePiggy, to bring more new users to the WePiggy protocol.
Besides, more marketing events between WePiggy and Aurora are on the way.

> “Participating in the ecosystem of NEAR is an important part of our multi-chain deployment plan. The launch on the Aurora can undoubtedly get traffic support from the Aurora & NEAR community, gain greater influence, user base and capital scale, and increase WePiggy’s industry reputation and brand value. ”

> – Ron, Zheng, Founder and CEO of WePiggy

We are excited to announce that WePiggy is coming to Aurora, an EVM layer 2 running on NEAR.

WePiggy Is Coming to Aurora, Bring Multi-Chain Lending Protocol to NEAR

Do you want more?

More is $NEAR. $NEAR is now.

Aurigami is proud to announce that we have received a $2M DeFi rewards grant in $NEAR from Proximity Labs!🥳

If Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild has taught us anything, it’s that “happiness is only real when shared”, and who better to share this joy than you. As a token (hehe) of appreciation for our lovely community, we will be sharing the love of $NEAR in the form of *EXTRA YIELDS* for all of you!

## More is $NEAR 🔥🔥🔥

$NEAR incentives will be distributed to the Deposit + Borrow slots of USDC.

Users who deposit/borrow USDC on Aurigami will be entitled to receiving TRIPLE YIELDS (Deposit APY + $PLY + $NEAR)!

Our goal has always been to grow the much-needed liquidity on Aurora and boost the ecosystem’s growth. As one of the most liquid crypto assets, we believe USDC has the highest potential to help grow Aurora.

From a user’s perspective, more of you can benefit more from this targeted incentive! From a protocol’s perspective, it’s more strategic to target the asset with the highest growth potential, which is incidentally the asset with (potentially) the most idle funds in Aurora.

## So how much is more $NEAR?

In celebration of this joyous occasion, APYs will be BOOSTED with extra $NEAR reward from Mar. 16, 10:00PM UTC+8 to Mar. 23, 10:00PM UTC+8.

During this period, $200,000 worth of $NEAR (valued at the time of writing) will be distributed to the depositors and borrowers of USDC.

## Juicy Yields 🧃

With the injection of $NEAR incentives into the USDC pool, you might encounter some odd but GOOD scenarios with the Deposit and Borrow APY:

⚠️ Note: The following scenarios DO NOT take into account $PLY incentives, which when taken into consideration will LOWER the borrow APY and INCREASE the deposit APY.

⭐⭐⭐

### Scenario 1 — Deposit APY > Borrow APY for USDC

THIS IS GOOD.

Having a higher deposit APY than borrow APY means that the yield you earn from depositing is more than the interest you have to pay back on your loans.

This scenario is fantastic for recursive depositing and borrowing, since you can basically “borrow for free” to farm more incentives.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

### Scenario 2 — Negative Borrow APY for USDC

THIS IS GOOD. THIS IS VERY GOOD.

A negative borrow APY means that we’re essentially PAYING YOU to borrow, so borrow on fellow Aurigamists.

Why is this possible? The $NEAR rewards you will earn exceeds the interest you have to pay on your loans. And this is without taking into account $PLY incentives, which will push it even lower!

So what are you waiting for? Deposit and borrow now when APYs are the juuuuuiciest and incentives at the highest! 😋
Thanks to all of you, both Aurigami and Aurora are on the cusp of greatness, and this is all without the primary sale of $PLY yet!
So anon, who wants to get paid for borrowing?

Aurigami is proud to announce that we have received a $2M DeFi rewards grant in $NEAR from Proximity Labs!

Aurigami's USDC pool APY boosted with NEAR incentive!

Hello, Community (world),

Our team is excited to announce that we are cleared to launch, [GalacticWay](https://awesomenear.com/galacticway) will be live today — a next-generation NFT marketplace on the $NEAR blockchain — GalacticWay was born out of necessity, to bring the first NFT marketplace to the NEAR ecosystem that addresses a specific customer pain, access to curated collections of NFTs, on a network that is positioned for large-scale adoption, scale, and mainstream activation. Our team firmly believes that this will be the year that NFTs, and more specifically NEAR becomes mainstream.

**More about the platform itself**

The GalacticWay marketplace shares many of the core features of the predominant marketplaces on Solana and Ethereum, such as MagicEden or Opensea. From the Home page, users have access to trending, upcoming, and new drops, highlighting the top mover as our banner image on the home page. Community members will also have access to growing Stats features, that provide an overview of the top collections that can be filtered by highest list price, to lowest. Community members also can see the corresponding floor price, % of volume, volume, avg price, and more, which can be filtered by date-range.

Our goal is to be product-oriented and listen to our community. The long-term vision for the marketplace will ultimately be determined by the feedback we receive and solicit. Our goal is to further strengthen our focus on community by providing industry-leading support resolution, with a strong approach to content that will help keep engagement high and address specific trending topics across all channels, Discord, Twitter, etc.

Our system is being developed by our cross-functional team of founders, engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers, all working towards a shared goal and vision for this product, and developing a community around our work and the marketplace itself. Our team is located primarily in Switzerland and The United States.

**Why $NEAR?**

Near was first conceptualized as a high-performance network built for enterprise-grade scale — In 2018, their original mandate was to deploy the MainNet, achieved in Oct 2020. Since the focus has been on the continued growth of the ecosystem and innovative changes to the network. The most noteworthy feature is the Rainbow-Bridge, allowing for cross-chain communication between assets, ETH, 🔁 NEAR — $NEAR solves for many use cases that make competing layer-1 solutions less scalable, and therefore less appealing to enterprise institutions and organizations, and the mass-market.

Some recent highlights and innovations in the web3 space — Cross-chain portability through Aurora’s EVM and Aurora Bridge, allows for cross-chain value transfer of ETH and ERC-20 tokens — To Rubic, that recently shipped their multi-chain swap protocol allowing users to swap, or exchange Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, Polygon, and many more. The innovations are occurring rapidly, just keeping up can be dizzying. Like with anything, the best results come from a continued focus on a singular goal, and in our case, that goal is to introduce an NFT marketplace on a scalable user-friendly blockchain, $NEAR.

The world of blockchain is still somewhat ethereal to the general public with less than 20% of the US population having any true understanding of NFTs as an asset. Most of the general public and more specifically the US investment community, can see the intrinsic value of a store of digital value, which logically makes sense, a digital currency, but a jpg? It’s much harder for older demographics to see the utility and intrinsic value of an NFT. Our team sees this as an opportunity. Selling the general public on the overall utility of NFTs is something the entire industry needs to take on to ensure further growth and scale for generations to come. All of these customer problems can be viewed as opportunities, and GalacticWay will be positioned to capture some of its market shares.

Thank you letter from the team

We appreciate you, fam, for taking the time to learn about GalacticWay and $NEAR.

Our team is actively hiring, so please reach out to us if this is a project that you would like to work on — we need people with a shared vision to help our team control outcomes and continue building a great product and community–jobs@galacticway.io
If you want to follow along and be the first to know when we go live go follow us on [discord.gg/galacticway](http://discord.gg/galacticway) or [twitter.com/galacticwaynft](http://twitter.com/galacticwaynft) or come visit us at [galacticway.io](https://galacticway.io)

Our team is excited to announce that we are cleared to launch, GalacticWay will be live today — a next-generation NFT marketplace on the $NEAR blockchain.

Launching Galaticway on the NEAR Protocol

Web3 users looking for an easy bridge between fiat (currencies like the US Dollar and the Euro) and crypto needn’t wait any longer. [NearPay](https://awesomenear.com/nearpay), the first debit card and payments widget in the NEAR ecosystem, now bridges fiat and the crypto world in one seamless user experience. 

Launched in late 2021 by Switzerland-based Kikimora Labs, NearPay announced its debit card wait list in early March. NearPay initially hoped to attract 1,000 users to its wait list, but had more than 18,000 in under a week. 

“We hoped that people would welcome our card product, but we definitely didn’t expect that so many people would show interest,” said Ilya Romanov, Chief Marketing Officer at NearPay. “We highly appreciate the support of the community. And now we are working hard to deliver a product that people are waiting for.”

## How the NearPay card works

Set to release later this year, NearPay is a debit card that comes as both a physical card and a mobile-based app. NearPay offers a number of features for consumers, developers, and merchants to make instant transactions and payments using their preferred cryptocurrency, including NEAR. 

“You will see no difference between crypto and fiat payments,” reads the NearPay website. “Simple. Fast. Both directions.”

NearPay also allows users to track their spending through the app, and offers world-class security to keep accounts safe. Though some particulars are still in the works, the NearPay card will support 3DSecure and is already secured through Verified by Visa. There will also be features such as spending limits, with the full feature set becoming available by the end of March or early April. 

## A seamless Web3 gateway 

The NearPay team believes that the crypto debit card will be amongst the easiest ways to dive into crypto, making it a seamless part of daily life. 

Consumers can top up their NearPay card balances, and use it to make purchases immediately. “The cards will be NEAR-oriented but support other cryptocurrencies as well,” says Ivan Ilin, Chief Operating Officer at NearPay. 

NearPay offers several tools to developers interested in using the card for their apps and projects. To get started, NearPay offers a plug-and-play widget, simple documentation, webhooks and APIs, and a developer console. 

“For developers, we provide a simple API with an SDK,” says Ilin. “The integration is possible with a website or a mobile application. We provide a merchant dashboard where one can see all the transaction statistics.”

NearPay also helps onboard traditional businesses into the global Web3 ecosystem. The team built a payment gateway for merchants with no transaction or setup fees, allowing businesses to accept crypto for all of their goods and services, while a handy dashboard allows businesses to see data on payments, invoices, and more. 

“For businesses, we support two scenarios: fiat-to-crypto to a user’s wallet and fiat-to-crypto to a merchant’s wallet for a certain order,” Ilin explains. “We work with NFT marketplaces, DeFi projects, and many others.”

## Countries supporting NearPay 

The NearPay widget is currently covered in 56 countries and supports 27 currencies. The NearPay team is currently working on adding more supported countries and currencies, as well as making the transaction fee lower for the users.

“Our first cards will be made for Europe,” says Ilin. “But we have plans to cover all of the countries, including the United States and Asia.”

To see the full list of countries currently supporting NearPay, visit Kikimora Labs’ Notion website.

Web3 users looking for an easy bridge between fiat and crypto needn’t wait any longer. NearPay, the first debit card and payments widget in the NEAR ecosystem, now bridges fiat and the crypto world in one seamless user experience. 

Introducing NearPay: the First Bridge to Fiat Debit Card on NEAR

Bastion is live on Aurora Mainnet! Check us out at app.bastionprotocol.com

All of Aurora’s current lending protocols are almost identical Compound forks. Bastion plans to be MUCH more. We have an exciting lineup of new product verticals coming within just the next two weeks! 🥳

Bastion differentiates with a focus on innovative time-based tokenomics and superfluid composability. We are also the only lending protocol on Aurora that uses Flux’s official, decentralized, high-quality Amberdata oracles, aggregated from multiple centralized and decentralized exchanges. 💪

Each chain has their own native DeFi primitives. 🏆

Our mission is not just to be the chain-native lending protocol of Aurora, but to grow the Aurora ecosystem and bring new transformations to the DeFi lending space.

To begin, Bastion will support ETH, NEAR, USDC, and USDT. We will list more assets over the next few weeks.

## Pre-mining $BSTN

We have increased emissions rates by 10x during pre-mining, and will retroactively airdrop users the amount they pre-mined. You will not be able to view the amount of BSTN you have pre-mined until after the pre-mine period. This prevents users from exploiting the pre-mining program. Read more about BSTN here.

We’re extremely excited for the journey ahead. Shoutout to our OGs and Testnet users — we are very thankful for our earliest supporters! WAGMI.

Bastion is live on Aurora Mainnet

Aurigami has unfolded and taken off on the Aurora mainnet!

Users can now multiPLY your wealth with Aurigami, the first money market protocol on Aurora.

To start off, Aurigami will support ETH, WBTC, WNEAR, USDC, and USDT, with more assets to come soon.

In our latest testnet version, users were able to enter a maximum of 4 markets in total. On the [mainnet app](https://app.aurigami.finance/), you can rejoice knowing that there is no limit on the number of markets you can enter!

A huge part of why this was possible is owed to the recent [Aurora Engine 2.4.0 upgrade](https://awesomenear.com/articles/aurora-engine-2-4-0-release), which we are also proud to share that Aurigami had contributed to. Since the very beginning, helping the Aurora ecosystem grow and flourish has always been one of the main goals of Aurigami.

We highly recommend giving the [brilliant piece](https://aurora.dev/blog/aurora-engine-2-4-0-release) by Aurora a read if you haven’t already.

## Auditgami ✅

A quick note on our audit results — previously we had shared that 3 contract reviewers were conducting a simultaneous security audit on Aurigami. Today, we are pleased to update that we have passed all 3 of them!

Your security is our top priority and we wanted to ensure that our users can indeed multiPLY in peace before the actual release.

## Premining $PLY

Paging bridgoooors and farmoooors alike!

As a way to reward our earliest investors and supporters, premining for $PLY will be enabled starting now, and will last for 4 or more weeks.

All 5 available assets (ETH, WBTC, WNEAR, USDC, and USDT) will be eligible for premining, with liquidity incentives being distributed equally to each of the 10 borrow/lend slots.

![](https://awesome-near.s3.amazonaws.com/aurigami-is-live-on-aurora-mainnet-ply.jpg)

40% of the PLY token supply is reserved for liquidity mining, with 0.5% of this portion being emitted as premine rewards each week. This means that 20M PLY will be distributed on a weekly basis.

To view and keep track of the amount of PLY you have accrued, you can simply navigate to the [Rewards page](https://app.aurigami.finance/wallet/rewards).

More details about PLY including its complete tokenomics will be shared by the end of the premine period. For more information about Aurigami, kindly refer to our documentation [here](https://docs.aurigami.finance/).

Soon is really here now.

We are ecstatic to bring the function of money markets to the Aurora DeFi economy, and link arms with the other existing/emerging DeFi protocols to accelerate the ecosystem’s growth.

This is just the first step of many to come, now onwards to bigger and better things.

Aurigami has unfolded and taken off on the Aurora mainnet! Users can now multiPLY your wealth with Aurigami, the first money market protocol on Aurora.

Aurigami is live on Aurora mainnet

We are happy to announce the latest release of Aurora’s EVM Engine, version 2.4.0. Despite its innocuous-seeming version number, this release has had a big impact on several of our partners and thus furthers Aurora’s mission to expand the Ethereum ecosystem. Let’s get to it!

## Summary:
1. Quick reminder
2. Why is this update important for both users and developers ?
3. The Aurigami case
4. Technical details

## 1) Quick (and useful) reminder

Aurora is built on the NEAR blockchain, which differs from Ethereum 1.0 in a number of ways. The important one for this story is that the NEAR protocol places limits on how many things each transaction can do, while the Ethereum protocol only sets limits on each block (though users can set limits for their own individual transactions).

Therefore, Aurora must (in theory) fit an entire Ethereum block into a single NEAR transaction. This is quite challenging, but with Engine release 2.4.0 we have pushed some performance optimizations which move us closer to this ambitious goal.

## 2) Why is this update important for both users and developers ?

Many defi projects were meeting the error **Exceeded the maximum amount of gas allowed to burn per contract** and were confused because “gas” and “contract” are terms in Ethereum.

However, this error was actually coming from the NEAR transaction; “gas” was referring to NEAR gas (not EVM gas), and “contract” was specifically referring to Aurora’s Engine smart contract on NEAR. Given this context, the error message is pretty clear; there is some maximum amount of gas a contract is allowed to burn in a single transaction and our Engine is exceeding it trying to run these defi transactions.

Well guess what? With the 2.4.0 engine release, the problem is slowly coming to an end - we reduced the Engine’s gas usage by a factor 2, opening some very important use cases for developers, and making life easier for users by making it twice harder to accidentally hit the limit.

In particular, the amount of EVM computation that can fit in a single transaction now is sufficient to unblock some defi use cases that previously were simply not possible on Aurora.

## 3) The Aurigami case

We would like to shout out [Aurigami](https://awesomenear.com/aurigami), one of our DeFi partners, for devoting development resources to help us identify some of the opportunities for optimization that lead to this new release.

Thanks to the Engine 2.4.0 release, Aurigami was able to launch [on Aurora’s testnet](https://testnet.aurigami.finance/). As they are a borrowing and lending platform, this update was a core requirement to run their platform as smoothly as possible. It is globally even more important as this type of platform is crucial for the decentralized financial infrastructure of the Aurora ecosystem.

We are excited to see our ecosystem continue to grow and look forward to future updates that enable yet more defi use cases you know and love from Ethereum!

## 4) Technical details

If you’re still here, that’s great! You’re in for a real treat. Let’s get technical.

Let’s start with a quick recap of what the [Aurora Engine](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine) is and how it works. The Engine is a smart contract written in Rust on the NEAR blockchain. It contains a full EVM interpreter to be able to execute transactions exactly the same as Ethereum, as well as all the auxiliary logic for validating transactions before execution (checking signature, nonce, account balance vs gas price, etc).

When you send a transaction to an [Aurora RPC endpoint](https://doc.aurora.dev/getting-started/network-endpoints) our infrastructure wraps your signed Ethereum transaction into a NEAR transaction for the Engine. This means each Aurora transaction becomes a NEAR transaction, and therefore must follow the rules of the NEAR protocol. As mentioned in the summary, this is where the NEAR gas issue arises (and not Ethereum, as explained previously).

Naturally this raises the question: “how can the Engine be made more efficient so that it can do more EVM work within the same amount of NEAR gas?”

This is not an easy question to answer (and indeed we continue the optimization effort), but is critical for Aurora’s success. Fortunately for us, core developers at NEAR and developers at Aurigami, one of the affected defi projects, were willing to help us find answers to that question.

There turned out to be a few low-hanging fruits that together had a big impact.

- [Update to a more recent version of Rust](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/427) The rust compiler is good at optimizing the performance of code, and is always getting better. Simply moving to a later version of rust gave about a 1% improvement essentially for free.
- [Use little-endian representation of numbers on the EVM stack](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/sputnikvm/pull/7) The EVM technically is defined to use big endian encoding, however most modern architectures use little endian. Constantly switching the byte order of numbers going on and off the stack for arithmetic operations was quite costly compared to using little endian on the stack and only switching to big endian when necessary (e.g. writing to storage or returning a result).
- [Short-circuit the account empty check](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/439) An Ethereum account is considered “empty” if its nonce and balance are both 0 and no code is deployed there. Of course as soon as any one of those conditions is not met we need not check the others.
- Caching values read from the NEAR state by the Engine contract ([#438](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/438)) ([#446](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/446)) This improvement had the biggest impact on gas usage of the Engine. The full details as to why are given below.

All these changes together made the Engine consume around half the NEAR gas it did previously when executing certain defi transactions. This 2x improvement was enough to unblock Aurigami and allow them to [launch on Aurora’s testnet](https://testnet.aurigami.finance/).

To understand why the caching change was so impactful, we need to know a little about how NEAR represents state and how it determines gas costs. As many blockchains do, NEAR uses a trie to store the state as this allows creating fairly compact proofs of what is stored on chain. Each contract on NEAR has its own key-value storage for its state, and this is embedded within the full NEAR state trie.

NEAR is very careful about setting its gas costs. The goal is to ensure they can maintain the 1-second block time which enables the web2-like UX of nearly instant transaction confirmations. To achieve this goal it must be true that no block can take more than 1 second to process, and in particular all the transactions in the block must also fit in this time. Since gas is the measurement of computational work, the idea is simple: ensure the gas costs are carefully measured so that 1 second of work done by a transaction corresponds to a fixed amount of gas, and then set the limits much lower than that.

To have such a stringent connection between gas cost and wall-clock time, there must be a separate cost for essentially all operations a transaction could cause the node to perform. For example, there is read_base which is the cost for doing any contract state read whatsoever, as well as read_byte which is the cost on top of the base cost per byte read. Getting back to the state details, there is also the touching_trie_node cost which is the cost incurred for each node of the state trie that must be touched to read or write a value from storage.

As it turns out, these IO costs made up a large fraction of the total gas used by the Engine; more than 50% in some cases.Therefore, reducing the number of state reads necessary by introducing caching was a net win. Even though the cache logic itself has a cost (not to mention its memory footprint also has a cost), this was less than the amount saved by doing fewer reads.

To add even more nuance here, it turned out that some types of values required different caching logic than others. One particular value, called the “generation” is an implementation detail of the Engine. Each address has a “generation” associated with it. This value allows us to “delete” an entire address without actually incurring much IO cost; we simply increment the generation and ignore any state that was associated with lower generation values.

This means that reading a value from an EVM contract’s storage (which looks like a single read to devs at the Solidity level) turned out to be multiple reads because the Engine needed to read the generation first. However, the generation does not change over the course of a transaction (if an account is deleted and recreated in the same transaction these changes are actually cached in memory by the EVM interpreter, so the generation value written in the NEAR state never changes during a transaction). Moreover, a single transaction generally doesn’t touch many different addresses (even complex defi transactions rarely call more than 10 different EVM contracts). Therefore we can cache the complete address to generation mapping with each read, and this is exactly what was [implemented](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/438).

On the other hand, EVM contract storage lookup themselves could not be fully cached without significant overhead both because the values could potentially be much larger than the 32-bit number representing the generation, and because the keys could be much more numerous; if a transaction invokes 10 different contracts and each had to read 10 values from storage then that is 100 different keys to cache along with their values.

Moreover, it’s not clear all this caching would be worthwhile since a given value from the contract storage may not be read multiple times, whereas we were essentially guaranteed to need the generation value for an address multiple times. Therefore, the same kind of cache we used for generation values was not suitable for more general caching. However, it did benefit from a different kind of cache. Due to an inefficiency in the EVM interpreter (which we will address properly in the future), it turned out that what looked like reading a value once at the Solidity level, translated into consecutive, repeated reads of that value at the Engine level. There were examples where the same value could be read 3 or 4 times in a row! Fortunately consecutive, repeated reads can be addressed with an extremely simple LRU cache of size 1, and this is what was [implemented](https://github.com/aurora-is-near/aurora-engine/pull/446).

Whew, congrats on making it to the end! I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the Aurora Engine. We continue this kind of optimization work as we advance our mission to expand Aurora to include more and more use cases. If this sounded interesting to you and you are proficient in Rust, consider taking a look at our careers page, we’d love to hear from you.

Despite its innocuous-seeming version number, this release has had a big impact on several of our partners and thus furthers Aurora’s mission to expand the Ethereum ecosystem.

Aurora Continues to Push EVM Scaling With Engine 2.4.0 Release

After weeks of development, [the newest version of AwesomeNEAR](https://awesomenear.com/) has finally been launched.

Apart from our hard-working dev team, we also owe it to our brilliant community - thank you, NEAR fans, for your support as well as your feedback which has led to the progress AwesomeNEAR has made so far!

Note the new features in this version and let us know your thoughts:

- Access NEAR Protocol stats via homepage, track daily price, market information, etc.
- Monitor the trend of NEAR & its DApps, check their on-chain data, eg. transactions, active accounts by day.
- Follow NEAR ecosystem trending projects & newly-updated projects via homepage.

Stay tuned for other work-in-progress features:

- Leaderboard/ranking of daily transactions, active accounts, etc.
- Project-specific news, articles & tweets on individual project pages.
- Get in touch [@awesome_near](https://twitter.com/awesome_near) on Twitter should you have any questions or suggestions.

As a token of appreciation, we hosted this giveaway of 50 $NEAR upon our February launch and we’d like to thank everyone who [followed & joined us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/awesome_near)! Rest assured this is only the beginning…

The five lucky winners are -  **@redxhunter34** **@steppevert** **@Tomy556677** **@CarlCarlKarl** **@nandadonny27** .

Stay close for our next announcement, everyone, take care in the meantime!


After weeks of development, the newest version of AwesomeNEAR has finally been launched.

AwesomeNEAR February Launch Giveaway - 50 NEAR for 5 lucky winners

NEAR Foundation has awarded a $50,000 grant to Sender Wallet to help its development on the NEAR-based non-custodial browser extension wallet. Sender Wallet is now available in beta release on Chrome, enabling testers and early users to send, receive, and store their NEAR assets.

Sender Wallet Beta Release now available in the [Chrome Web Store](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sender-wallet/).

Wallets are one of the first and most important user onboarding experiences to start using blockchains and decentralized applications. Sender provides an all-in-one and effortless wallet solution that serves as a gateway to the wider NEAR ecosystem.

The $50,000 grant will help Sender to continue to innovate on the NEAR experience with in-wallet features. Today, Sender offers users NEAR native asset management, in-wallet staking, integration of NFTs, instant swaps, implicit account creation, and optimized asset security.

“NEAR has put a strong focus on accessibility and user-friendliness when designing its features. In the last year, the NEAR ecosystem has been growing at an exciting speed and scale. With the launch of Sender Wallet, we hope to provide existing and new NEAR users the opportunity to use a solid crypto wallet on-the-go,” said Kenny, Founder at Sender Labs.

“We’re very excited to support the growth of Sender Wallet as part of the NEAR ecosystem,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. “Delivering accessible, secure wallet experiences to users is critical for achieving mainstream adoption of Web3. Sender is taking the right approach and I know we’ll see great things from the team.”

NEAR Foundation has awarded a $50,000 grant to Sender Wallet to help its development on the NEAR-based non-custodial browser extension wallet.

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