Into Aurora_01: Overview

written by: cenwadike.near || twitter: @iam_combi16

Introduction

In its simplest form, Aurora is a solution that extends the Ethereum ecosystem. It offers a fully compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for seamless application deployment for developers and improved user experience.

The Basics

Aurora works as a set of smart contracts on top of the NEAR blockchain, and is mainly composed of two parts: Aurora EVM and Rainbow Bridge. This enables Aurora to enjoy NEAR scalability at low cost while providing the familiar experience of Ethereum for developers and users. Developers can simply take their solidity contract and deploy them on Aurora while users enjoy an improved experience at a near $0 cost.

The Aurora Rainbow Bridge is a decentralized and trustless means for users to bridge their assets between Aurora and other blockchains including Ethereum. This trustless design facilitates a censorship resistant cross-chain interoperability that is secured by the underlying blockchains.

Because Aurora EVM runs as smart contracts on NEAR protocol, and inherits the runtime, blockchain layer, validators and security from the NEAR

Aurora Architecture

Like most L2 solutions, Aurora is composed of a complex package of software that work coherently to facilitate seamless experience for developers building on it and for users using its services and applications.

The image below gives a high-level overview of Aurora’s architecture.

A good way to understand how the pieces of Aurora works together is to take a tour with a transaction made by Alice. Alice, who have been convinced by her friend Bob, wants to explore the Aurora ecosystem. She intends to move 10 ETH from Ethereum to Aurora. And hopes by moving her ETH she would be able to enjoy the benefits of NEAR without learning anything new.

Alice signs a transaction to transfer 10 ETH from her account on ethereum to her account on NEAR.

Behind the scene, the transaction locks her 10 ETH on the NEARonEthCLient (part of the Rainbow Bridge). And Prover (part of Rainbow Bridge) generates and submits proof that 10 ETH has been locked on the Rainbow Bridge.

Aurora Relayers verifies the proof and sends a NEAR transaction to mints 10 ETH to Alice account on Aurora. And just like that Alice has trustlessly sent 10 ETH to Aurora.

Now that Alice has 10 ETH on Aurora, she wants to transfer 2 ETH to her friend Bob. To understand how this works, we will also follow a transaction she makes to transfer 2 ETH to Bob on Aurora.

To transfer 2 ETH to Bob, Alice signs a transaction to transfer 2 ETH to Bob. This transaction is received by an Aurora node (NEAR node + Aurora “abilities”) that validates the transaction, spine up Aurora EVM runtime and call smart contract as described in the transaction.

The node also gossips this transaction to other nodes who can run and validate the the transaction.

After which Aurora transaction is conformed to a NEAR standards and gossiped to other NEAR nodes in the Network. The transaction eventually get validated and added to the NEAR blockchain.

Once the transaction is added to NEAR blockchain and finalized, Bob becomes the proud owner of 2 ETH, and Alice owns 8 ETH.

Conclusion

This is a soft landing to Aurora and how it facilitates EVM transactions on NEAR. Link to reference will be provided if you want to dig deeper. However, I suggest you pay closer attention as more in depth blogs will come in which dive into the implementation details and how you can deploy and integrate your interface to Aurora.

Aurora doc: https://doc.aurora.dev/

NEAR transaction: https://nomicon.io/ChainSpec/Transactions

Rainbow Bridge: https://near.org/blog/eth-near-rainbow-bridge/

Aurora Architecture: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*4RpdifVSJr3Q17h3o8RbFQ.png

Aurora repository: https://github.com/aurora-is-near

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