What is Aurora?

Aurora is a solution, that allows to execute Ethereum contracts in a more performant environment—NEAR blockchain, a modern layer-1 blockchain which is fast (2-3 second transaction finalization), scalable, and carbon neutral. Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implemented as a smart contract on NEAR Protocol. We are here to help scale Ethereum ecosystem for developers to operate their apps on an Ethereum-compatible, high-throughput, scalable, and future-safe platform, with low transaction costs for their users.

Aurora provides the Ethereum 1.0 development experience, with layer-2-like speed and scalability. If you are an Ethereum developer, getting started on Aurora is as easy as changing the RPC endpoint you interact with.

Aurora supports all tools available in the Ethereum ecosystem — MetaMask, Truffle, Hardhat, Remix, etc. Additionally, NEAR's trustless bridge to Ethereum means even the assets on Aurora are the same as Ethereum. For example, account balances in Aurora's EVM are denominated in the same Ether (ETH) as on Ethereum itself.

Aurora Developer cheatsheet

Gas fees

Transaction cost ~$0.02

Maximum gas per transaction (a monthly updated section)

The main issue we have on Aurora and we're constantly working on improving is the maximum gas per transaction limit. The nature of the issue comes from the fact that the block time on NEAR is 1 second (for comparison it's 14 seconds on Ethereum). Usually, the transaction must fit in a block. There's no easy way to map NEAR Gas to Ethereum Gas. If you see "error": "wasm execution failed with error: FunctionCallError(HostError(GasLimitExceeded))", it means you've hit that limit. It's often possible to optimise the contract to overcome the issue (reducing transaction batch sizes, optimising big transactions). We're working hard on making the issue non-existent, but it's important to know it's present at the moment.

Running your own Aurora Node

If you feel like you need to run an Aurora Node yourself, please use this setup. The hardware requirements for the node are the same as for NEAR RPC Node though we recommend having 20-30% more storage.

Adding assets to the bridge

We have recently released this UI interface to deploy and view bridge tokens. The metadata status update is also available. And to add your assets to the bridge you need to create a PR in bridge-assets (see readme).

Aurora Testnet Faucet

To request some ETH on Aurora Testnet, go to Aurora Testnet Faucet Still have questions? Check out our answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs).