NEAR Town Hall (July 2021) | Part 2 Aurora

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   hello everybody hopefully you can hear me well uh for me the hopping interface is a little bit shattering uh right now but uh i hope you can see at least a little bit of a slight shot of myself and a little bit of a slide show that i'm willing to share with you so this is the first time when uh on near town hall uh we are presenting aurora project right you probably remember me from the previous town halls i was a

2. 0:30

   a product manager for the rainbow bridge and now what we are doing is we are creating a separate brand a brand that is called aurora and we are doing a spin-off so what we're now is a separate company so my title right now is is actually a ceo of that company right so uh but obviously the talk is not about myself right the talk is is about the project that we are building together right so what is aurora aurora is

3. 1:02

   our solution to extend ethereum economy this is the project that consists of two separate pieces that you previously might have known from the from the previous uh calls in previous interviews one is the rainbow bridge itself another one is an evm it was called an evm not a very nice naming for for the feature i would say but together we are gathering this under the same under the single brand that is aurora

4. 1:43

   so what is in fact aurora so the most simple way how you can think about aurora is the scalability solution or how as these solutions are often called nowadays is an l2 to ethereum right so our task and our goal is to ease the scaling of the ethereum applications and obviously you know quite a lot about ethereum and its high transaction fees and uh just a pretty ginormous ethereum ecosystem that wants to grow even more and unfortunately there is no place on ethereum blockchain

5. 2:30

   to do it right the solution that ethereum foundation provides to the ethereum community is f 2.0 but this solution is still in the development and it will be some time until the solution is going to be live in the market uh so in the meantime there are other solutions that are developing and their focus is to help to solve the ethereum scalability problems right here right now and aurora is one of the solutions

6. 3:03

   we have a little bit of uh specifics that is behind the solutions and uh i believe many things connected with aurora are not the same as in other projects and first of all aurora is not a separate blockchain it is not a thing that is working outside of the blockchain aurora is a smart contract that is working on top of near blockchain and because of this we can aurora can inherit all of the good features of near blockchain and there are many of them right the low

7. 3:42

   cost of transactions fast finality times uh or like the confirmation of the transactions and also uh ability to shard the blockchain right and what's your blockchain so what we have put in in the core of aurora inside of aurora is the evm implementation that was that is called sputnik vm it is developed by parent attack and now raw engineers are contributing also uh to it obviously our contribution is still small but we are

8. 4:14

   on rampant there pretty actively so we have the evm runtime right or the evm environment where we can execute transactions now what transactions are can be sent there literally any ethereum transactions this can be transactions for transferring tokens this can be uploading of ethereum smart contracts any ethereum smart contracts right or or this can be you know interactions with this uh with these smart contracts like using the landing protocols using

9. 4:49

   def any other d5 protocols or working with nfts right moreover aurora works also out of the box with all of the tooling that is there in the ethereum ecosystem and the way how it is implemented is that the interface to aurora is mimicking absolutely the same interface it is called web3 json rpc that is used for ethereum mainnet so our connection point is absolutely the same which means that all of the different

10. 5:23

    tools that are there in the market everything that you get used to they are able to work with this interface including metamask truffle hard hat remix and anything that you can imagine from the ethereum ecosystem including all of the existing front ends of different applications they are all going to be interoperable with aurora and well not going to be they are interoperable with aurora right and we are going even

11. 5:56

    further uh actually we are saying that the aurora base token is f um and by saying base talk and i mean that this is the token that users need to spend in order to pay for fees inside of aurora this is not a this was not a very simple solution for us because obviously on near blockchain users need to pay near tokens for the transactions and how we connected it how we made it well this is a little bit of magic happening

12. 6:26

    behind the scenes here but for the users it is completely transparent in metamask you will see at last gas prices of 0.1 gray and this is going to be constant for usage of the aurora and by saying constant i mean just the prices that are going to be the prices are going to be very very small in comparison to ethereum right now and the cost of the transaction is go is somewhere around one to two cents

13. 7:01

    so alex can i can i just ask a question real quick to kind of summarize what you just went over so if i understand you correctly aurora essentially is going to be offering extremely ethereum like usability experiences on near so that ethereum developers or ethereum users can use existing ethereum products as if it was on ethereum meaning there's an eth-based token meaning they can connect uh with metamask and use all the common familiar tools they're used to but it'll actually run on a near smart contract is that right yeah

14. 7:34

    absolutely right absolutely right okay so now we have the runtime or we have the place where to run these smart contracts now we are missing one additional piece is ability to move the tokens and ability to move the assets and data from ethereum to aurora right we don't want aurora to be completely separated from ethereum right we are extending the ethereum ecosystem right uh this is our goal

15. 8:07

    it's not launching a fork of ethereum right so that's why we need to allow this interoperability and rainbow bridge was a step towards this direction right and as you know around three months ago we have launched a rainbow bridge and already at the moment we have more than 5 million worth of tokens and different tokens including erc20s and near token itself breached over the bridge

16. 8:38

    the bridge is working everything is good with it there were no uh no problems with it i would say though there are there were no problems with the smart contracts sometimes there are some issues happening with the relayers and providers who provide to us rpc access to near and to ethereum blockchains but this is not influence in the the funds and anything like that so the security of the bridge was actually

17. 9:09

    proved by the security audit that was happening exactly one year ago and now since we understand that uh since that moment in time we have introduced some changes not a lot but still introduce some of them we have scheduled an additional audit that is going to happen in the end of summer in the beginning of uh in the beginning of uh autumn actually right now there is an audit happening to help us prove that

18. 9:39

    rap near implementation is correct so we are doing audits we are taking security at the very top uh uh as a as our top priority and so we are going going forward with it right now rainbow bridge supports any erc20 f and actually near bridgen from ethereum to near and we are finalizing this for aurora and last but not least just remember the design of the rainbow bridges is done in a way that it allows

19. 10:18

    anything to be bridged right it's not only the token bridge it's any arbitrary data bridge and also a cross chain contract calls bridge and for the thing for these things users need to or like developers need to implement specific connectors that are working with the bridge and these connectors are using this bridge as just a service to prove that some events were happening on the other chain

20. 10:48

    so if you're thinking of a use case where some cost some some some operations need to be performed in the high cost and high value environment like ethereum though other operations need to be performed in the lower coast environment like near then i believe creating a connector to the rainbow bridge is probably the best thing that you can find in the market right now and to be more specific about aurora right so rainbow bridge is a separate brand right but now we're talking about aurora and

21. 11:33

    what actually you are able to do with aurora itself well we have a separate thing that is called aurora bridge it is accessible on the aurora website and right here right now on the aura test net f and erc20 tokens may be bridged already on the mainnet last friday we launched the we launched f transfers and uh pretty soon we are going to launch erc20 transfers and obviously we are testing it right now testing these transfers right now on the testnet but pretty soon i believe it's it's a

22. 12:12

    matter of days and we are going to enable it on the mainnet and now any defy application will be able to deploy absolutely the same smart contracts which they are using on the ethereum net and work with absolutely the same tokens that are bridged from ethereum mainnet to aurora so alex real quickly what was the timeline you said of when that's going to become possible or when that is starting to already happen so on the mainnet f

23. 12:45

    transfers are already there uh erc20 transfers are going to be there in a matter of days from now so i believe by the end of the week there is a super high probability that this transfers will be already alive wow so maybe just to recap for everybody um aurora has its own brick top of the rainbow bridge the rainbow bridge is fully permissionless and decentralized and actually it's the bridge infrastructure that will be able to be replicable across other chains as well beyond ethereum

24. 13:19

    and that's actually i think a very tactical move that the the near team is planning on uh pursuing in the coming months for aurora itself though i think what we're able to understand is that there's going to be a very seamless interconnectivity between ethereum and near but really ethereum and aurora um so that it is a semblance as if you're still on ethereum uh with everything included in

25. 13:42

    that right right that's true the the only thing that that you will need to as a user you will experience that meta mask at some point in time will propose you to change the network to aurora and you just need to click ok and work with the same application in the same front-end interface as usual now let's talk a little bit about governance because this is a topic that uh i believe many of you are interested in and uh and so the question is how aurora

26. 14:14

    is going to be governed right uh how because this is a complex smart contract you need to figure out how to how to work with it right um so the answer here is the following look we are playing the hard mode of the of the ultimate compatibility of the ultimate bridge and we just cannot do any shortcuts and say that well aurora developers are going to hold the full control of the of the aurora smart contract we just cannot do this

27. 14:46

    so in order to do the governance we are launching a dao well then that way that is going to be called aurora dao right and uh it is going to be based on sputnik version 2. uh you probably know sputnik dao it has more than 100 dows already launched on your blockchain with with the user usage of this smart contract so we are going to use it absolutely the same way and then this down we are going we we will invite there to this dao

28. 15:16

    or like we are inviting to this dao all of the uh major players from the ethereum ecosystem because aurora again is a project for ethereum ecosystem we want it to be governed by the ethereum ecosystem itself and uh initially we would think that around maybe 25 30 or something like that members are going to uh to be composed in what we call the dow committee and later on additional people are going to be added to this uh added to the dao depending on the

29. 15:54

    on on how the tao is going to vote and what are going to be the goals of it now and obviously the question that appears is oh but wait a minute what is then aurora token when it is going to be there right well the answer is pretty simple there is no aurora token right now users are paying f for their transaction fees on the protocol level it is near token that is spent for the tran for to pay for transactions right but this is completely transparent for the users and you know all of this black

30. 16:36

    magic is happening behind the scenes right so it is only two tokens that are right here right now appreciating the value of aurora project if this is f because this is just a new use case for f as a token and it is near because everything all of the operations are happening on your blockchain so it is naturally for near token to appreciate this value however i can say to you that the dao

31. 17:08

    might decide to launch aurora token it is a big question what this token is going to do and what is going to happen with it and uh this is completely up to the doubt to decide this was our intention from the very beginning not to launch aurora token do everything in this in a decentralized manner because we truly believe in the decentralization and we understand that there is literally no way how to do the proper project

32. 17:41

    in the blockchain vertical without proper governance and proper launching of the token and all of that stuff right so we just cannot see how these things might be done uh by a single company we would like to see it as a decentralized decision so short answer there is no aurora token if anyone tries to sell euro token this is just a scam and it's only the dao who will be able to uh to issue the token and to work with it according to its rules

33. 18:21

    if i can just summarize this alex and correct me if i'm wrong but what i'm understanding is quite actually fantastic uh for both the ethereum community and the near community because in essence what aurora is going to do is it's going to bring over ethereum projects that need to scale and give them a cost-effective scaling scalability solution as if it was built natively on ethereum

34. 18:44

    but as you just mentioned near is still going to be used beneath the surface to pay for transaction fees so the near community will most definitely benefit from the onloading of projects under aurora is that all uh more or less aligned with what you're we're discussing absolutely absolutely okay so what else uh next point here is our plans for for the future right aurora has lots of additional features that that are coming right i was telling you about the

35. 19:19

    compatibility i was telling you about the dao but this is something that is going to be implemented pretty soon what about autumn what about next year and i believe we have here multiple interesting features for you including the following first of all we would like to launch the fast talking transfers over the bridge including rainbow bridge and aurora bridge both and by saying fast talking transfers i

36. 19:48

    mean the token transfers that are going to be finalized within minutes and your experience of using the bridge will be absolutely the same as the experience of using ethereum and with all of the respective um uh you know delays in transactions uh in transaction confirmation on ethereum so 30 seconds minutes several minutes this is something that you can expect with this additional feature we would like also to uh to help people to denominate the fees

37. 20:29

    on aurora not only in f but also in other erc20s and many are hoping to to get this feature and to help denominate the fees in in stable coins right because then it looks like okay so the fee is more or less fixed uh it is not dependent on the on the exchange rate um so all cool uh yeah this is something that that also our you know all of this black magic that is happening behind the

38. 20:59

    scenes with the near and or and f token it will help us to implement this this feature is not far from now and last but not least is that we would like to launch the hide the blockchain user experience that will actually help to connect web to world to the blockchain and we have all of the constituents of this solution because just think of this we have the execution environment of the ethereum

39. 21:31

    which is what is called which many calls which many people are calling web3 right so the blockchain decentralized and okay my cat is here blockchain decentralized and uh secure right and another thing that we have with near blockchain is the fast confirmation times right so which means that transactions can be settled in in the seconds right and in one second or two second time is something that you expect from the web 2 application right

40. 22:11

    and this is pretty cool so so we are able to bridge these two worlds together with aurora and we have some some cool ways how we can do this and last but not least i do not know whether you are following the the shard in progress on your blockchain pretty closely uh but the chain team is doing a great job right now uh and the uh and in the final stages of testing of chardon and there is a plan to release shot in

41. 22:42

    this autumn which means that the sharded version of aurora can start in the development of chardon version of aurora can start this year and obviously we will be able to deliver it next year so charted version of aurora that will allow for horizontal scalability of ethereum applications is not that far wow alex first of all i think this is a good uh a good moment for the the near ecosystem to kind of all together reflect on the fact that we're early to

42. 23:20

    what aurora is going to be bringing into near and um from this road map that we see and with what you mentioned as web 2 compatibility on top of this i think aurora is shaping up to be an absolute monster uh in its own right that should undoubtedly be uh you know put in the same discussion as the polygons the arbitrage the optimisms the stark wares that are that are building out on aetherium as well um is there any final thoughts that

43. 23:44

    you'd like to leave with the the near community um going forward to expect from aurora timelines dates um onboarding public events anything of that sort right so in general all of the info related to aurora uh people well users and developers and anyone are able to find on the aurora website it is it's pretty simple aurora the dev uh you can also follow us on twitter and in telegram and uh since we have more

44. 24:16

    than 200 people on the call i invite everybody to screenshot our new youtube channel specifically devoted to aurora unfortunately it has this long name because of the restrictions of of the youtube we need to have a hundred subscribers there to to to choose a custom url there so in what i'm inviting everybody to to go and search it or just you know follow this url and subscribe to aurora youtube channel

45. 24:49

    uh this will allow us to have a show the url obviously and the most important thing is that you will be able to see every friday 15 minutes uh starting at 1300 udc we have a 15 minutes call that we called friday alpha leaks and this is the moment when we are sharing all of the new juicy fresh information about aurora and everything that is connected uh to it and everything that we were

46. 25:20

    we have been working there and just to leave you with the final uh with the final thoughts uh aurora is fully operational both on test net and mainnet it is there for it is there it is waiting for your smart contracts to be launched without zero changes it is there to integrate with all of the existing tools so if you are a developer i believe the most simple way how you can extend uh your projects and allow for additional markets

47. 25:56

    is just to go it and try it out and share your feedback with us i guarantee that using aurora is extremely simple for the developers and for the users both so let's kick start this ecosystem together i believe we have a great product that can bring lots of value to ethereum and to near both thanks everyone