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!

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

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.

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

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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Recent articles on NEAR and ecosystem projects.