[Proximity Labs](https://www.proximity.dev/), a research and development firm targeting the NEAR ecosystem, is excited to announce the creation of a $350M grants DAO aimed at projects, organizations, and individuals building decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the NEAR blockchain. Well-known DeFi projects Curve.Fi, Sushi, Dodo, Kyber, Woo, and NEAR native projects Ref, Burrow, Onomy and Trisolaris have, or are in the process of launching on NEAR’s secure and scalable blockchain, with more to follow.

To support the burgeoning ecosystem, the grants DAO aims to distribute up to 40M NEAR tokens over a period of 4 years, currently worth over $350M. The application process is open to all projects, with grants ranging from $5,000 to several million.

DeFi builders can express their interest in the grants DAO via [this form](https://form.jotform.com/212877151135050).

## The Latest on NEAR

Over the last few weeks on NEAR, several projects have launched, core infrastructure has been deployed, and total value locked (TVL) crossed the $150M mark. This TVL includes a mix of NEAR native assets such as REF, SKYWARD, and OCT alongside Ethereum assets via the Rainbow Bridge including ETH, USDC, DAI, and USDT. These launches have led to a surge in wallets using NEAR, with more than 1.3 million active accounts on the network.

NEAR and its protocol is primed to become a key layer-1 blockchain for DeFi applications, thanks to its unique design, called Nightshade. While other blockchain protocols require each node in the network to settle every transaction, Nightshade allows transactions to be executed by groups of “shards”. This approach allows different servers to store parts of the blockchain, processing transactions in parallel. As a result, **NEAR’s unique design allows limitless scalability alongside fast, cheap and secure transactions**.

Pairing DeFi with NEAR’s sharded blockchain means finance will further be made more inclusive for anyone thanks to fast transactions, low fees, and access to cutting-edge financial tools.

NEAR also has one of the most interoperable and versatile frameworks for developers from various backgrounds. It already attracts a mix of multi-chain projects leveraging Aurora, the EVM environment, native projects implemented in Rust, and substrate-based projects via Octopus. No other layer-1 offers this flexibility.

Initially, the DAO will consist of prominent members of the broader DeFi and NEAR ecosystems, and will expand membership over time to include as many engaged community members as possible. We will release more details regarding the DAO’s governance process over the next few weeks.

If you want to try out DeFi on NEAR now, the following products are live:

- **Rainbow Bridge**: A bridge for transferring tokens between the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains.

- **Ref Finance**: A native NEAR AMM written in Rust that supports multiple pool types and farming

- **Metapool**: Liquid staking for NEAR. Turn your NEAR in stNEAR and earn staking rewards while providing liquidity on Ref!

- **Trisolaris**: An EVM-based AMM running on Aurora. Compatible with MetaMask!

Proximity Labs is excited to announce the creation of a $350M grants DAO aimed at projects, organizations, and individuals building DeFi apps on the NEAR blockchain.

Announcing a $350M Grants DAO for NEAR DeFi Projects

NEAR is thrilled to announce that [Flux](/flux), the first cross-chain oracle for economically secured data feeds, is now live on the NEAR mainnet!

With its cross-chain oracle platform, which features support for other networks like [Aurora](/aurora-dev), Flux brings secured data feeds to any and all high-throughput data apps — like trading platforms that need access to lots of reliable data — on the NEAR blockchain. To facilitate their mainnet launch, the Flux team is also releasing the $FLX token, which will be vital in helping to power its oracles.

“We were one of the first teams from Ethereum to make the jump to a new layer-one, NEAR, back in January 2019,” said Peter Mitchell, co-founder of Flux. “Jasper De Gooijer, co-founder of Flux, and I started building on NEAR before testnet was live and have worked closely with the team to design a best in class oracle to make NEAR the go-to layer one for economically secured DeFi.”

Earlier this year, Flux raised $10.3m in seed round funding from leading investors like Distributed Global, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Figment Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures.

Flux’s unique feature set will bring a next generation oracle capable of powering mainstream use cases like derivatives, lending, stablecoins, dynamic NFTs, yield farming, reserve currencies, insurance, asset bridging, off-chain computation, and more to NEAR.

Crucially, Flux’s oracles can power all of these use cases with economic guarantees. By utilizing Flux, protocols on NEAR now have access to the most secure source of data in the crypto space.

## Flux’s Two Oracles

The Flux team currently offers two oracle products. Their First Party Oracle allows trusted data sources like Coinbase, AmberData, Kaiko, and others to post data directly on-chain to protocols. By contrast, Flux’s Economically Secured Oracle enables protocols to request crowdsourced, API, and Price Feed Data from any on or off-chain sources.

The Economically Secured Oracle consists of a robust validator network with professional validators like Figment, which runs the Flux Validator Infrastructure. The Flux Validator Node is so lightweight that it can run in a browser and with no minimum stake. The service is open to all community members that wish to secure the network.

Unlike existing oracles such as Chainlink, which features whitelisted node operators, on Flux any community member can participate in securing off-chain data brought to the blockchain. This creates a decentralized environment that is magnitudes ahead of competitors.

## $FLX Token Launch

To coincide with Flux’s launch on the NEAR mainnet, the team is also releasing its own utility token. Flux views the $FLX token as the bedrock of its ecosystem, which will be entirely governed by the Flux DAO and secured by validators. $FLX is capped at a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens.

“$FLX tokens secure and strengthen the network, serving as collateral for nodes for select data requests and validation,” writes the team on the Flux Medium page. “Depending on the sensitivity of data requested, data requesters can specify the collateral amount for nodes to stake up to process their request. In addition, $FLX tokens serve as collateral for disputing data outcomes and challenging their conclusions”

The Flux DAO enables token holders to vote on upgrades and design changes across the Layer One platforms that Flux supports.

NEAR is thrilled to announce that Flux, the first cross-chain oracle for economically secured data feeds, is now live on the NEAR mainnet!

Flux, World’s First Fully Decentralized Oracle and Oracle Aggregator Launches on NEAR

NEAR, the leading blockchain network has announced a strategic partnership with Alchemy Pay, the hybrid crypto-fiat payment gateway solution. Through this partnership, Alchemy Pay will enable easier access to NEAR Protocol by providing fiat on-ramps across 65 countries via Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other local payment methods, including mobile wallets and bank transfers.

In addition to the payment rails, Alchemy Pay will be integrating the NEAR token onto its crypto-fiat payment solution to support acceptance of the token across Alchemy Pay’s global merchant network. This network includes the e-commerce leader Shopify, the global marketplace Arcadier, and Hong Kong’s leading chain Pricerite.

NEAR also announced it has joined the Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance co-founded by Alchemy Pay. The Alliance connects key entities in all sectors of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. Members will incubate new projects that seek to solve industry challenges and promote cooperation between networks, dApps, crypto exchanges, DEXs, wallets, stablecoins, fiat payment rails, merchant networks, and more.

The Alliance will benefit from NEAR Protocol’s extensive network and expertise. Its Proof-of-Stake consensus provides users with a decentralised form of finance while maintaining carbon neutrality. NEAR also supports a number of ecologically-focused projects building platforms and applications on its blockchain ecosystem.

Together, Alchemy Pay and NEAR have identified a number of projects that require nurturing in order to fulfil their potential. In response to this need, the partnership is initiating funds for investment to expand the ecosystem’s technology and community. Developer tooling and documentation, validator and staking resources, open-source libraries, public goods projects, research & development, decentralized applications with open source components, educational materials for developers, and interoperability solutions can all benefit from this initiative.

“NEAR is leading the way in ecologically sound blockchain development,” said Alchemy Pay CEO, John Tan. “Their vision for sustainability will influence the work of the Alliance we are building together, making it all the more positive for the industry at large.”

“Ultimately, blockchain solutions must be well integrated with the fiat currency economy,” said NEAR’s CEO, Eric Trautman. “Alchemy Pay is crucial in helping us get there.”

The application scenarios of Alchemy Pay are rich with possibility, and the number of NEAR mainnet accounts exceeded 1.5 million in November this year. The cooperation between NEAR Protocol and Alchemy Pay is a promising development for the blockchain industry.

Alchemy Pay will enable easier access to NEAR Protocol by providing fiat on-ramps across 65 countries via Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other local payment methods.

NEAR Integrates Alchemy Pay’s Hybrid Gateway, Joins the Blockchain Infrastructure Alliance

Travala.com, the world’s leading cryptocurrency-friendly online travel agency, and NEAR Protocol, the high-performance and high-security blockchain platform, today announced a strategic partnership to integrate NEAR Protocol’s NEAR token on the travel website’s platform. 

The integration will enable NEAR token holders to book over 2.2 million hotels and homes, 600+ airlines, and 40,000+ activities in more than 230 countries. “It’s announcements like this that perfectly symbolise NEAR’s mission to bring billions of users into the Web3 world,” says Erik Trautman, the CEO of NEAR Foundation. 

Through the partnership, holders of NEAR will be able to participate in a cheaper, fairer, and more inclusive travel economy alongside leading cryptocurrency assets like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Travala.com’s native AVA token. Additionally, NEAR Protocol will be using Travala.com’s corporate account services for the company’s internal travel requirements. 

With savings of up to 40% available on Travala.com (when compared with other online travel agencies), a total of over 3,000,000 travel products will soon be at the fingertips of NEAR token holders worldwide, increasing the exposure of NEAR Protocol’s ecosystem to an ever-expanding user base. 

“We are very excited to see how unlocking travel for NEAR token holders will help other see the benefits of building and using NEAR,” says Trautman. 

Commenting on the partnership, Juan Otero, Travala.com CEO, said “In continuing our commitment towards mass cryptocurrency adoption, we’re very excited to partner with NEAR Protocol to champion the growth of the crypto community and to bring a new use case to NEAR. The team impressed me with their vision for their business, and I have no doubt that we will see them making waves in the crypto community.”


NEAR token holders will soon be able to book over 3,000,000 travel products in 230+ countries, boosting NEAR adoption.

Travala.com Partners with NEAR Protocol to Integrate NEAR

deadmau5, the DJ and Producer has teamed up with rockband Portugal. the Man, Mintbase, and NEAR to release a single as an NFT.

The song, titled “this is fine” is being sold exclusively as a collection of 1 million NFTs on the Mintbase NFT marketplace, which runs on the NEAR blockchain, with tokens [now on sale](https://www.mintbase.io/thing/nb0-oBR379DzoFYeYv-LesjVNmrVlDs5IqQ8hfDfnMU:deadmau5.mintbase1.near).

The announcement took place in Miami during the Art Basel art fair, which takes place every year in the American city.

Roughly three quarters of the 1 million NFTs, are being sold at Miami’s Art Basel festival for $1.29 a piece. The remaining NFTs will be sold as part of a collection of additional awards.

In the “Ultimate Bundle,” some 50,000 NFTs will include artwork, a limited edition NFT, merchadise pack and a spot on the guestlist of a forthcming DeadMau5’s concert.

At the time of writing, nearly 500,000 of the [NFTs have already been sold](https://www.mintbase.io/thing/nb0-oBR379DzoFYeYv-LesjVNmrVlDs5IqQ8hfDfnMU:deadmau5.mintbase1.near).

“It’s about adoption. It’s about adopting this way of doing things for artists, and it’s also about public adoption and companies working together to adopt technology that’s going to make this easier for everyone,” said deadmau5.

The announcement forms part of a wider series NEAR has lauched to help people get to grips with Web3 technology across America.

For most people, buying NFTs has been a complex experience, involving additional fees, delays and multiple wallets. With NEAR and Mintbase, users will be able to buy NFTs using fiat cash instantly, with super low fees, thanks to an integration with payment rail provider, Stripe.

NEAR will be visiting a number of key cities over the coming months. Starting in Miami, NEAR and the NEAR bus will be traveling to New York and San Francisco over the coming months.

![Deadmau5 Launches NFT Partnership with Mintbase and NEAR](https://awesome-near.s3.amazonaws.com/articles/near-bus-hero.jpg)

NEAR is on a mission to make blockchain and crypto a simpler experience that anyone can take part in. From buying NFTs, creating a DAO or joining a Guild, at NEAR it’s a simple as clicking a mouse. [Find out how](https://near.org/).

deadmau5, the DJ and Producer has teamed up with rockband Portugal. the Man, Mintbase, and NEAR to release a single as an NFT.

Deadmau5 Launches NFT Partnership with Mintbase and NEAR

MoonPay, the Swiss-based crypto payments infrastructure company used by more than 5 million people, has announced customers in 150 countries worldwide will be able to buy $NEAR directly through its platform.

While MoonPay already allows users in Europe and elsewhere to buy $NEAR using a debit or credit card, this is the first time users in 150 countries, including the United States, will be able to use MoonPay’s quick, simple service.

“By providing a direct on-ramp to NEAR, we’re giving more people exposure to this exciting and dynamic ecosystem,” said Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and CEO at MoonPay.

“We’ll be watching eagerly as NEAR develops and new projects emerge as the community expands. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for it next.”

MoonPay has made the buy flow significantly faster for users, with the creation of fixed quotes that guarantee the amount of crypto users will receive once they purchase.

The full list of countries $NEAR is available in can be found here. While $NEAR is now available to buy in the US, there are still a number of states where purchasing has not yet been activated. The states where citizens cannot buy $NEAR at launch are Louisiana, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.

Users in the remaining 46 states and 150 other countries will be able to buy $NEAR on MoonPay from today.

## Supercharging Sharding

The announcement coincides with the launch of sharding on NEAR, the next significant chapter in the NEAR blockchain.

NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding accelerates the speed of the network to process more transactions securely as well as increasing its capacity to run bigger and more resource-intensive Dapps, like gaming.

NEAR has more than 20 [gaming](/categories/gaming/) and [NFT projects](/categories/nft/) currently running on the blockchain that can take advantage of super-low fees, and infinite scalability.

DeFi is also set to benefit from MoonPay’s integration and the upgrades to the blockchain. Well-known DeFi projects Curve.Fi, Sushi, Dodo, Kyber, Woo, and NEAR native projects Ref, Burrow, Onomy and Trisolaris have, or are in the process of launching on NEAR’s secure and scalable blockchain, with more to follow.

MoonPay has announced customers in 150 countries worldwide will be able to buy $NEAR directly through its platform.

MoonPay Launches NEAR Fiat On Ramp in 150 Countries Worldwide

We’re excited to announce that developers working in the NEAR ecosystem will now be able to use KYVE as a storage and validation solution for their data streams starting today.

KYVE bridges data from NEAR, taking a snapshot of the complete NEAR chain, including both blocks and transactions, and stores it permanently on Arweave, the decentralized storage network that offers Web3 projects a platform for the indefinite storage of data.

By leveraging Arweave, the network provides a secure, scalable, and immutable solution that can grow over time.

## How does the integration work?

Decentralized uploaders and validators power KYVE’s network. Validators ensure that the uploaded data is correct. If the data is incorrect, the stake of the uploader gets slashed. This mechanism ensures that only valid data is uploaded from the NEAR chain to Arweave.

![NEAR Partners With KYVE To Bring Permanent Storage to Ecosystem](https://awesome-near.s3.amazonaws.com/articles/near-partners-with-kyve-2.jpg)

KYVE’s architecture supports multiple blockchains, making it easier for users to interact with different chains. Additionally, the uploaded data is available and reliable as the network’s uploaders and validators are incentivized to keep the system healthy.

“At NEAR, we’ve always believed the future success of blockchain technology will be built on collaboration. Partnering with KYVE to provide simple, reliable access to Arweave, enabling developers on NEAR to use this class-leading data storage solution is part of that vision,” comments Erik Trautman, NEAR Foundation CEO.

To learn more about running an incentivized validator and help grow the KYVE x NEAR community, join the NEAR pool!

NEAR Partners With KYVE To Bring Permanent Storage to Ecosystem

## Overview

In Q1 2022 the NEAR Foundation plans to stake 1,500,000 million NEAR on Meta Pool. This will help decentralize the allocation of NEAR tokens in new /current validator nodes and help secure the network– which are both core to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols such as NEAR.

## Background

We approached the NEAR Foundation during NEARCON to explore options for collaboration in a way that could have the largest impact on the ecosystem.

We decided not to apply for a grant, since we already had meaningful commitments from our early backers and the current fee structure allowed us to bootstrap the protocol.

As an alternative, we proposed that the NEAR Foundation stake liquid tokens on our platform. Going back to our earliest AMA´s and webinars, we have said: — our goal is to help decentralize and strengthen the NEAR network — so we developed this delegation structure and began discussing it with the NEAR Foundation Funding Team.

## Growth over Grants

Instead of Meta Pool receiving a sum of money in a one-time grant, we are receiving support via adoption of the Meta Pool model. The NEAR foundation will become a user of Meta Pool just like any individual user: depositing 1.5 million $NEAR tokens, which can be withdrawn at any time, and receiving the equivalent balance in stNEAR.

The NEAR Foundation’s plan to delegate such a large amount to Meta Pool is a strong vote of confidence that should send a clear message: Liquid Staking is an important part of the growing NEAR ecosystem and Meta Pool is a strong project supporting this staking model. As a prerequisite of this delegation commitment Meta Pool will complete a full review / audit of their smart contracts & codebase. Once this delegation is completed we are optimistic that other large major projects will begin to explore committing to delegations with Meta Pool in the upcoming year.

## Advantages of Staking with Meta Pool.

This are the main advantages that our liquid staking platform offers:

- The tokens that are staked on Meta Pool will be capital efficient.
- Support new validator nodes coming to the network.
- Help improve the censorship resistance of the protocol.
- Incentivize retail token holders to discover liquid staking.

## Tokens that are capital efficient.

When the NEAR Foundation stakes the 1.5 million NEAR on Meta Pool, the protocol will mint around 1.49 million stNEAR (approximately). This NEP-141 token can now start to flow back into the ecosystem. The NEAR Foundation Funding team will begin to explore creative ways to utilize tokens to support the broader ecosystem.

## Decentralisation and Censorship Resistance

The key part here is that the NEAR tokens are not locked on one validator node and it will flow to 51 validator nodes, it will also accrue $META rewards so the NEAR Foundation will also have voting rights on our ASTRO DAO. These $META tokens could also be delegated to projects that have overlap with Meta Pool.

It is a green field opportunity that we are really excited to be collaborating with the NEAR Foundation upon. More details will be provided as we finalize the commitment date.

### Securing the allocated tokens.

Another important aspect to disclose is that the tokens will be non-custodial, that means that during the 24 months that it will provide staking to Meta Pool the NEAR Foundation will have complete control over the tokens.

### Being the new validator on the block.

Launching a validator node requires work, just have a look around the documentation or ask the Open Shards Alliance Discord, it requires deep knowledge and a team that can maintain the infrastructure to keep the node running efficiently and be cost effective.

When NEAR Foundation starts staking on Meta Pool, it will distribute those one and half million NEAR tokens to new nodes and also allocate it to the top performing nodes that sit outside the Top 10. The protocol needs new validator nodes to come in and keep the network running and provide the base for all our DApps to run on.

Thus improving the performance of the NEAR network protocol. We are convinced that this partnership will be a success and will show that community is part of the DNA of the protocol.

## Next Steps

Our commitment is that on January 3rd all the Meta Pool smart contracts will be audited by Blocksec, who is a Tier 1 security firm.

These are the repositories of the contracts that will be audited:

- Staking contract — https://github.com/Narwallets/meta-pool
- $META contract — https://github.com/Narwallets/meta-pool/tree/master/meta-token

Once the audit has been completed and we have implemented the changes/improvements to our smart contracts, then the NEAR Foundation will finalize the delegation.

2022 is looking bright! Keep on staking!

In Q1 2022 the NEAR Foundation plans to stake 1,500,000 million NEAR on Meta Pool.

NEAR Foundation embraces Liquid Staking by committing 1.5 million $NEAR to Meta Pool

In line with the multichain future vision, DODO is expanding the list of networks it is available on. DODO is officially launching on the NEAR Protocol, using Aurora as the Ethereum-compatible scaling solution! Not only that, but DODO have reached an agreement with the NEAR team to have DODO as the **‘blue chip’ decentralized exchange (DEX)** on their platform. This unprecedented deal will ensure that DODO has ‘first mover’ advantage in this new and exciting space.

The NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that’s intended as a community-run platform to host decentralized applications (dApps), but with unique sharding technology designed to make it much **cheaper and more scalable** than some popular competitors like Ethereum. Does this mean the hardworking developer community has to reprogram the whole DEX from scratch? Not at all! Using Aurora as the Layer 2 go-between, DODO is able to seamlessly deploy onto the NEAR Protocol, despite having been developed to be compatible with the EVM.

“We’re excited to see big Ethereum players coming to Aurora to expand their businesses,” Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora, said, “I’m glad that in such a short timeframe we were able to satisfy all the technical requirements of DODO: RPC methods, The Graph integration, and others. And now on Aurora we see **one of the most influential decentralized trading protocols** being fully operational.”

## Why DODO On NEAR?

You might be wondering, “Ok, yet another chain DODO’s integrating with. Why should I care?” You might also be surprised to learn that Aurora currently has **an average block time of one second and zero transaction costs** (you read that right)! The NEAR Protocol and Aurora are fast, low-cost, easy to use, secure, and meet all of our technical requirements. The NEAR Protocol is also climate neutral, so you can save the environment and save money, too. Based on these and other considerations, the DODO Team has determined that NEAR/Aurora will likely be the “next big thing” in Layer 1 technology. Together, we foresee this deployment ensuring DODO’s continued growth and market success for years to come.

There has never been a better time to make a dApp on NEAR - and if that’s something you’re into, please don’t hesitate to contact DODO.

## Looking Ahead

DODO expect to achieve the following over the next six months:

- Total Value Locked (TVL): **$100M+**
- Volume: **$300M+**
- Users: **100k+**
- Transactions: **100k+**

To achieve these, the DODO and Aurora/NEAR teams will collaborate in a marketing campaign to promote the deployment, and especially our generous user incentives, on all official channels.

“Our deployment on the NEAR Protocol is unlike our other recent multichain campaigns,” said Diane Dai, DODO’s CMO, “Since DODO has a unique ‘blue chip’ advantage on NEAR, we are more prepared than ever to bring market-leading liquidity to as many people as possible.”

Aurora believes that the launch of DODO is an important milestone in creating a healthy NEAR and Aurora ecosystem with strong partners and a great variety of products for the community.

DODO is coming to the NEAR Protocol by launching on Aurora.

DODO launches on Aurora to encompass the features of NEAR blockchain

NEAR is pleased to announce that Terra, a leading blockchain protocol deploying a suite of algorithmic decentralized stablecoins, is integrating its UST stablecoin on the [NEAR](/near-protocol/) and [Aurora](/aurora-dev/) ecosystems. This integration is made possible through a partnership with leading DeFi protocols [NearPad](/nearpad/) and [Rose](/rose/).

NearPad, which aims to be the DeFi hub on Aurora, includes a DEX AMM product where users will be able to trade assets and provide liquidity with UST pairs. Rose is a stableswap and borrowing protocol on Aurora that allows users and other DeFi platforms to tap into deep, capital efficient, stablecoin liquidity.

The partnership between Terra, NearPad, and Rose will facilitate the growth of UST to new ecosystems on both NEAR and Aurora. Users will be able to bridge assets directly from Terra to Aurora via Allbridge or from any of the other supported chains. Both NearPad and Rose will offer incentivized opportunities for users to deposit UST liquidity into the protocols, which then can be accessed by the wider NEAR and Aurora communities.

“Partnering with Terra to bring UST to ecosystem to our community will be a big step towards growing the Near and Aurora ecosystem,” says Aiden Knox, Founder of NearPad and Rose. “I’m excited to be working closely with the Terra team to not only bring UST to NearPad and Rose, but also for the deeper integrations and collaborative projects this partnership enables.”

UST’s expansion to the NEAR ecosystem demonstrates the importance of a move toward a multi-chain,composable future. Users will have access to the benefits of protocols built on NEAR technology without any compromise in terms of having access to some of the most popular assets such as the leading decentralized stablecoin.

“NEAR has been built for simplicity, security and scalability,” says Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR. “Stablecoins like UST provide a simple interface to store value and interact with apps which need to use a stable unit of account. Connecting NEAR and Terra ecosystems via Allbridge allows apps like Rose and NearPad to offer new ways to use stablecoins to both communities.”

“We’re excited about the NEAR ecosystem and are looking forward to continuing UST’s cross-chain expansion via NearPad and Rose,” adds Jeff Kuan, Head of Business Development of Terra. “Working with strong teams like theirs, we’ll see UST embedded more deeply in the global DeFi ecosystem.”

NEAR is pleased to announce that Terra is integrating its UST stablecoin on the NEAR and Aurora ecosystems.

Terra Partners with NEAR and Aurora, Bringing UST Stablecoin to Boost DeFi Growth

NEAR Protocol has successfully raised $150 million in its latest funding round, accelerating its mission to help billions of people learn and use blockchain and decentralized technologies.

The round was led by Three-Arrows Capital with participation from several crypto-native funds including Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, Folius, Amber Group, 6th Man Ventures, Circle Ventures, and MetaWeb.vc — the NEAR ecosystem fund. The round also included several top angels including Alan Howard, Santiago Santos and Aave Founder Stani Kulechov cementing NEAR’s reputation among industry leaders as a fast-growing blockchain that combines simplicity, scalability and security.

“We are excited to support the NEAR team and ecosystem as they scale blockchain applications,” says Kyle from Three-Arrows Capital.

“With multichain interoperability of Rainbow Bridge, Aurora (EVM), Octopus (Substrate), and NEAR native’s Nightshade sharding technology, NEAR is best suited for empowering blockchain applications for mainstream adoption,” says Amos Zhang, founder of MetaWeb.vc.

“We’re delighted to be backed by such a fantastic group of investors. It provides proof of what’s been built, and what’s to come,” says Illia Polosukin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol.

The funding builds on the $65.9 million raised by the project so far, from backers across the globe including DCG, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.

## Fueling Decentralization

The funding will be used to accelerate adoption of Web3 technologies through ecosystem funding, developing NEAR’s regional hubs and raising awareness for the brand, the projects building on NEAR and its global community to new audiences.

NEAR has already established communities in Asia, Africa and Europe, and is looking to help support emerging communities in Latin America, Turkey and India.

“We are delighted to have such a fantastic list of backers supporting NEAR’s mission,” says Marieke Flament, NEAR Foundation’s CEO. “We are looking forward to leveraging the funding to improve access to blockchain technology in an ever growing list of countries across the world.”

NEAR Protocol has a proven track record of supporting its fast-growing ecosystem. In 2021, it allocated $800 million (now valued at $1.8 billion) — the largest of any layer 1 blockchain — to help fuel its mission to decentralize the community and help users reimagine finance, creativity, and identity in new and inclusive ways.

As part of that allocation, Proximity Labs, a research and development firm targeting the NEAR ecosystem, created a $350 million grants DAO (now valued at $800 million) aimed at projects, organizations, and individuals building decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the NEAR blockchain.

Since mainnet launch in Q4 2020, the NEAR network has processed more than 70 million transactions, and supports over 2.3 million accounts. It has 200,000 community members, 1,700 actively monthly builders and more than 100 guilds. It also became the first truly sharded blockchain, in Q4 2021, running with four shards on mainnet, with further upgrades scheduled for 2022.

NEAR Protocol has successfully raised $150 million in its latest funding round.

NEAR Raises $150M To Help Accelerate Mass Adoption of Web3

NEAR will for the first time offer Proof-of-Stake (PoS) delegators the chance to earn rewards in more than one token. Launching with Aurora, the Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilize the cutting-edge technology of the NEAR Protocol, stake farming contracts will allow validators to distribute more than one token to delegators that help secure the NEAR network.

This gives NEAR validators the unique opportunity to attract more capital while ensuring new and growing projects can take part in network security as well as gain exposure to delegators.  

NEAR is the first proof-of-stake blockchain to support stake farming contracts. This will provide opportunities for the NEAR ecosystem to further decentralize by allowing validators to take a more active role in supporting new and emerging projects.

“The new validator model allows for better alignment of the incentives in the NEAR ecosystem. We’re looking forward to seeing the collaborations between projects and professional validators and delivering much more value to the users,” says Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs. 

## What is Proof-of-Stake?

Proof-of-stake is a type of consensus mechanism used by blockchain networks to help keep them secure. It requires users to stake the network’s base token to become a validator. Validators play the same role as miners in proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin: they help order transactions and create new blocks. 

Proof-of-stake networks like NEAR, however, come with a number of improvements over proof-of-work. They use a lot less electricity to power the network – NEAR is certified carbon neutral – and doesn’t require expensive, specialized hardware to be a validator. 

As a result, proof-of-stake networks are likely to be more decentralized than their proof-of-work counterparts, as more people can meet the requirements of being a validator. 

## Staking and validating on NEAR

For validators to take part in securing NEAR, they must stake a certain amount of $NEAR tokens as collateral. Once staked, these tokens are then used to ensure the validator acts honestly. If the validator tries to cheat or change the blockchain record, the network burns part of the stake as punishment. 

There is a minimum threshold for how much $NEAR must be staked, which validators can invite delegators (token holders who want to secure the network without running validation hardware) to contribute to. Delegation is the opportunity for all token holders to stake in partnership with a validator, leasing a small portion of their validating node. Delegators can lock their funds into a staking pool and receive rewards.

## Challenges with existing PoS Mechanism

In the current system, just like any other proof-of-stake network, a user delegates the base token—in this case, $NEAR—to the validator and receives the same token back as a reward from staking, which is currently around 10% of annualized return. 

The current PoS mechanism creates a misalignment of interests from the professional validators, who specialize in server management for staking, and ecosystem projects, who build and grow the NEAR ecosystem. Previously, ecosystem projects on PoS networks couldn’t receive any benefits from validator rewards. With this new update, they now can. 

## A New Option for Validators and Delegators 

In NEAR’s new stake farming system, ecosystem projects can partner with validators to incorporate the project tokens’ farming into their rewards structure. This allows validators to split the NEAR staking rewards with the projects. 

At the same time, stake farming also creates a more compelling proposition to delegators who now get both NEAR and project tokens, with a much higher APY in most cases. This newly found synergy will likely accelerate NEAR’s ecosystem growth with further network decentralization.

Aurora is the first project to adopt this new vision for validators on NEAR. Going forward, other projects will also have the opportunity to take part in this radical new vision for securing NEAR and supporting the ecosystem.  In Aurora’s case, its DAO approved the new staking farm. The launch of the new Aurora validator is a fulfillment of the Aurora DAO promise to distribute 3% of AURORA tokens to the NEAR community.

While this is the first farm launched by Aurora, there is flexibility to open more in the future. 

This upgrade to NEAR protocol is one of several planned this year that will help the network further decentralize, become more inclusive, and help accelerate its mission to onboard the world into web3. 

NEAR will for the first time offer PoS delegators the chance to earn rewards in more than one token.

NEAR Launches Stake Farming To Unlock Ecosystem Rewards

Machina, the sharded data storage project created in collaboration with NEAR, Aurora, and online security protocol HAPI, is launching on NEAR to revolutionize how data is stored. The Machina team, which received a grant from NEAR Foundation, chose NEAR because of the simplicity and ease of writing code and deploying/testing Smart Contracts, as well as to take advantage of its carbon neutral, proof-of-stake blockchain.

Designed to provide scalable, cost-efficient, and immediately retrievable information on-chain, Machina uses the unique sharding properties of NEAR’s Nightshade to scale up the data stored proportionally to the number of validators joining the network. Entities using Machina’s storage are not tied to any specific payment model of any particular currency or asset. Instead, storage payment is deducted in stablecoins, which ensures that developers and users alike have an easier time dealing with fees.

Machina will use file-based storage, storing every transaction directly into it, removing the runtime needed to trigger the retrieval or uploading of data. The platform makes on-chain data accessible on-chain, along with all of blockchain’s security measures like consensus and decentralization. This will help usher in a new era of smart contract development.

By instituting a reliable, immediately retrievable, and always-online on-chain storage solution, Machina can be used by both NEAR apps — with the help of EVMs such as Aurora — and Solidity-based Smart Contracts on Ethereum. Beyond storing data, Machina allows dapp teams to query data and retrieve it without any off-chain requests, meaning Web 3 has a new tool for mass adoption.

## Data, done differently

To minimize time, energy, and computational overhead, Machina employs a method called File Fingerprinting, which maps data, giving each dataset a unique identifier. This means each validator will only have to approve or disprove the integrity of data by a given short text string. Consensus validation is then made based on the reached agreement on the fingerprint.

Unlike other proposed solutions of decentralized data storage, like Arweave, Storj, and Filecoin, Machina doesn’t use an energy-intensive proof-of-work protocol to validate or inversely invalidate the integrity of data. Instead, it leverages NEAR’s Nightshade sharding, allowing Machina to scale as more players join the network.

“The implementation of sharding on NEAR is crucial to set out a new standard for on-chain immutable storage,” says Dona Mara, CEO of Hapi. “Machina acts as a separate shard within the NEAR Blockchain.”

“This means that any dapp built on NEAR can communicate with Machina including storing and querying data. Interoperability is possible with NEAR nodes being installed in the blockchain that you want to interoperate with. Moreover, Rainbow Bridge might be of help in facilitating that.”

## Storage, without the gas

Since Machina will not use smart contracts, it will not have arbitrary Turing-complete computations. In other words, Machina won’t need to attach gas.

“We will be able to completely remove gas as a concept and not require attaching anything to the transactions,” says Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora. “To allow storing of huge amounts of data we can charge different fees depending on when the last time the given data was accessed.

The Machina storage network is currently slated for a Q4 2022 launch.

Machina, the sharded data storage project created in collaboration with NEAR, Aurora, and HAPI, is launching on NEAR to revolutionize how data is stored.

Introducing Machina: The World’s First Proof-of-Stake Storage Solution, Built on NEAR

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.

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