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

Aurora is pleased to announce an important and long-awaited milestone: Etherscan is now integrated into the Aurora chain, bringing the most popular explorer to its users and developers.

This instance of Etherscan on the Aurora network is called [Aurorascan](https://aurorascan.dev/), and leverages Etherscan’s comprehensive feature set and proven reliability. Through Aurorascan, users and developers can get access to developer tools and network statistics that provide extended insights into Aurora's EVM. This is a beta release, as more features will be added soon.

To extend the Ethereum ecosystem, Aurora believes that the proper solution should be as simple as possible to give projects the most seamless migration. For this reason, Aurora uses ETH as a base token—the token in which the transaction fees will be denominated. However, protocol-level/API compatibility is not everything. It is quite important for users and developers to have the same infrastructure projects in place to feel comfortable.

Etherscan is the most well-known block explorer for Ethereum, capable of delivering statistics, token transfers and lists, smart contract source code verification, and issuing read & write calls directly from the UI. Users will be able to view transactions, addresses, and blocks. Developers will also be able to see a wide range of charts and statistics related to smart contract execution, collator data, specific transfers between tokens, and a list of ERC-20 tokens on Aurora.

This instance of Etherscan on the Aurora network is called Aurorascan and is available at aurorascan.dev.

Aurora Integrates Etherscan to Deliver a Familiar Explorer Tool to Users

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.

Sender Wallet Awarded $50,000 Grant from NEAR Foundation for Mainnet Launch

It’s been a long time coming but we’re finally ready to share with you our lineup of amazing Aurigamists — the investors and partners who helped breathe life into Aurigami!

We’re excited to announce that [Aurigami](https://awesomenear.com/aurigami) has closed an investment round, co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation from Mechanism Capital, Amber Group, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Lemniscap, QCP Capital, DeFi Capital, Folius Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Genblock Capital.

Angels include Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora; Julian Koh, CEO of Ribbon; Bobby Ong & TM Lee , co-founders of CoinGecko; Matthew Tan, CEO of Etherscan; Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen; Santiago R. Santos.

We aspire to establish Aurigami as the primary money market on Aurora and behind the scenes, the team is working hard to ship out the mainnet.

Many of you have bombarded us with questions such as “wen WL” and “how WL” since the dawn of time, and right here right now we will be tackling these questions head on — soon.

How soon? In the coming few days, there will be a series of activities and tasks that you can participate in to become a part of Aurigami too 👀 More details of this campaign will be released so make sure you have those notifications on high alert! 🚨

We’re excited to announce our lineup of amazing Aurigamists — the investors and partners who helped breathe life into Aurigami!

Announcing the Aurigamists

NEAR is the latest chain to join The Graph’s hosted service, which continues to lead the way towards a multi-chain future. Integration with The Graph’s hosted service marks a huge step forward towards integration with The Graph Network. Once the The Graph community completes that integration, truly decentralized infrastructure for NEAR will finally be possible.

The NEAR integration enables developers to build subgraphs on the NEAR network using The Graph, allowing web3 infrastructure to support even more dapps. The integration utilizes StreamingFast’s Firehose interface, which is extendable to any blockchain and is the first end-to-end integration of the new core contributor’s previously proprietary (now open-source) technology. We will start seeing more Layer 1s integrate this technology soon.

“Our mission when we joined The Graph as core developers was to accelerate its multi-blockchain expansion and boost performances by orders of magnitude,” said Alexandre Bourget, Co-Founder and CTO of StreamingFast. “By integrating the Firehose into non-EVM chains, starting with NEAR, we are propelling The Graph into a new web3 development era.”

“We started NEAR with the goal of enabling more creators to build on blockchain and to create a more innovative and equitable web infrastructure,” said Erik Trautman, CEO of NEAR Foundation. “Integrating with The Graph is an important milestone for NEAR as we continue to eliminate barriers for developers working toward a decentralized web.”

Echoing the sentiment, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin added, “NEAR is excited to work with The Graph ecosystem as both groups build out the infrastructure needed for a more equitable and fair web. The Graph enables NEAR developers to build decentralized applications faster as it provides essential tools to build query-required representations of blockchain data."

“The Graph’s upcoming integration with NEAR is a must-have for Textile’s Filecoin Bridge system. We now have a truly cross-chain indexing solution that lets developers build Filecoin-aware dapps across the most important blockchains in the ecosystem,” said Carson Farmer from Textile, a dapp building on NEAR. “The Graph’s expansion to the NEAR ecosystem means Textile’s Filecoin Bridge has a whole other level of verifiability. The Bridge subgraph will provide NEAR developers with the ability to query Filecoin storage requests via The Graph, in a web3-native way.”

“When building on NEAR, implementing and maintaining their custom indexing infrastructure can be a real-time sink, which as a result allows us to spend less time building our core product,” said Jasper de Gooijer, co-founder of Flux, another dapp building on NEAR. “With The Graph’s support, we’re able to spend more time shipping and less time maintaining.”

Subgraphs are open APIs that applications can query using GraphQL. Developers building in the web3 ecosystem can use subgraphs to index and query data from blockchains, allowing for the data to be presented in a user-friendly, efficient manner. The Graph currently supports indexing data from dozens of different networks. The 22,000+ subgraphs to date that have been deployed on the hosted service are equipping developers with tools to build more dapps while helping bring blockchain technology towards mainstream use.

“We’re excited about this integration with NEAR as we continue to build out The Graph’s network to support a decentralized future,” said Eva Beylin, Director at The Graph Foundation. “As we build towards web3, we’re thinking about ways to make the decentralized ecosystem as strong and united as possible, and this integration is an important step forward for developers who can now more easily choose chains that best suit their needs.”

The Graph Foundation is excited to announce that Graph Node now supports indexing NEAR, a Layer 1 blockchain.

AwesomeNEAR

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