Aurora Launches its Validator on NEAR

Aurora is launching a validator to ensure transactions remain free for users.

Aurora, an Ethereum scaling solution that allows projects built on Ethereum to utilise the cutting-edge technology of NEAR, is launching a validator to ensure transactions remain free for users.

NEAR’s Proof of Stake consensus mechanism is based on a group of validators that organize transactions to create blocks on the blockchain, so that there is a consensus between the network’s nodes. Validators propose or attest blocks, while users’ stake in a validator is used to ensure good behavior and punish bad behavior. Validators receive incentives both for proposing new blocks and for attesting other validators’ blocks.

Aurora decided to launch a NEAR Validator, proceedings of which will be used to provide as many Aurora services for free as possible. At the moment the funds for supporting the Rainbow Bridge are provided by the NEAR Foundation, but we think that this approach is unsustainable. The validator is located at aurora.poolv1.near.

Aurora has created two important pieces of infrastructure: the Rainbow Bridge and the EVM Runtime.

We believe that these pieces of the infrastructure should be available for everyone according to the open source software principles: at least basic functionality should be free for everyone. That's why Aurora does not charge any fees for the use of the Rainbow Bridge: the users need to pay only the gas fees.

Because of the architecture of the Rainbow Bridge, it constantly consumes $NEAR and ETH to keep the networks synchronized. This amount is around 1000 $NEAR and 7 ETH per month, which totals in $30k. See: NEAR relayer and Ethereum relayer for detailed statistics.

Besides that we need additional funds for testing and updating the bridge and auto-finalizing the transfers from Ethereum to NEAR, as well as wrapping the EVM Runtime transactions to be consumed by the Aurora contract.

We will start with 9% fees and will adjust it over time according to the amount of the delegated funds. We encourage the NEAR token holders to adjust their delegation distribution according to their will to support the Aurora project and the decentralization of the network.

We at Aurora believe that the future of blockchains will strongly depend on cross-chain communications and interoperability. That is why we are committed to providing top notch technology to foster this development and excited to grow our services in line with this vision!

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