5 posts tagged with "Core Tech"

A core piece of Aurora’s technology is the Aurora Engine smart contract, which is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implementation deployed as a smart contract on Near. Therefore, Aurora sits at the intersection of both EVM and Near runtimes. It naturally draws us to think about comparisons between EVM and Near.

For example, the concept of “gas” exists in both the EVM and Near’s runtime. The reason is because of the famous halting problem, which says we cannot know in advance if an arbitrary computer program will finish in a finite time. In the context of a smart contract platform, this means we must measure (and limit) the computation the contract does at runtime. In both the EVM and Near, “gas” is the unit that is used to measure the computational work done by a smart contract.

Even though EVM gas and Near gas both measure the same thing, they are not identical. One analogy is miles and kilometers; both measure distance, but the numerical value of the same physical distance will be different depending on which unit is used. Computation is a more abstract concept than distance, but this analogy leads us to expect some kind of approximately linear relationship between EVM gas and Near gas, similar to how 1 mile equals 1.61 kilometers.

In this blog post, we explore this question and discuss the implications for developers building on Aurora.

Since its inception, the Aurora Protocol has continued to break boundaries in the blockchain world. Its latest innovation is a service known as Borealis Business, aimed at solving one of the most significant challenges for users of Web3 products – the concept of transaction fees.

The main goal of this article is to understand the Aurora Chain code. In a future post, we will discuss how it embellishes the Aurora Engine and how the advantages of an Aurora Chain correspond to different parts of code and Aurora architecture.

Aurora’s infrastructure is built upon an innovative combination—our Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) operates as a smart contract running atop the powerful NEAR protocol. Harnessing NEAR's innate ability for smart contracts to communicate with one another, we seamlessly route EVM-compatible transactions to any smart contract deployed within NEAR. By doing so, developers are granted unparalleled access to the best of both ecosystems - from a rich collection of sound and robust Solidity libraries to the groundbreaking NEAR accounts model and an ever-growing, expansive user base.

In the blockchain world, relayers are off-chain facilitators of data exchange and transactions between blockchain networks and/or layers. They are used primarily in decentralized finance applications, cross-chain communication, and Layer 2 solutions, like sidechains or state channels. In general, relayers listen for events and transactions from one point and then submit the corresponding data or transactions to another. For that, they can charge fees for their services, incentivizing them to operate and maintain their infrastructure.

Initially developed in-house at NEAR, the Aurora EVM is the official EVM for the NEAR ecosystem. Powered by the SputnikVM, it accomplishes a 1:1 experience with the Ethereum protocol.

This compatibility between Aurora and Ethereum is achieved by the Aurora Relayer, a JSON-RPC compatible server with Ethereum's Web3 API for the Aurora EngineIt has its own internal database to serve multiple read methods and an indexer that is constantly following the head and indexing blocks, transactions and logs to that internal database.