What is Aurora blockchain?

Aurora is an EVM implementation and a Layer-2 network that forms part of the NEAR ecosystem. It makes it possible to deploy Ethereum applications on the NEAR protocol. As such, Aurora serves as a connecting link between the older, slower, more expensive but much larger Ethereum network – and the fast, cheap, and scalable NEAR.

Non-EVM blockchains can be superior to Ethereum in many ways: for example, they can avoid the security pitfalls and computational inefficiencies associated with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. NEAR can scale almost infinitely thanks to sharding – and without complicated upgrades that Ethereum needs to implement sharding. Also, the staking and hardware requirements for NEAR are low, which makes it easy to deploy a validator – an important condition for scaling.

However, like all non-EVM networks, NEAR faces the challenge of expanding in a Ethereum-dominated industry. Smart contracts in NEAR are written in Rust or JavaScript, and not Solidity, so you can’t migrate an Ethereum dApp to NEAR. For a project like Uniswap or Sushi to deploy to the NEAR ecosystem its whole code would need to be rewritten – or you can use Aurora.

The average block time is just 1 second, and it takes just 2 seconds for a transaction to get finalized at an average cost of $0.02. The base currency of the network is ETH, and you can transfer funds trustlessly between Ethereum and Aurora using NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge. The chain’s own token, AURORA, powers the DAO and is used for incentives.

Developers can port dApps written in Solidity to Aurora, or build new ones using familiar tools like MetaMask, Remix, etc. Aurora counts over 200 projects in its own ecosystem, including Curve, The Graph, Synapse bridge, Gnosis Safe multisig wallets, etc.

What about NFTs, though? Well, if we are publishing a case study on Aurora, you can guess that this highly interesting blockchain ecosystem has an NFT scene of its own. We’ve even posted a blog article about it.

The main NFT marketplaces that support Aurora are tofuNFT. OpenBiSea, and Endemic. The most popular projects include the Ape DAO, AuroraPunks, and Aurobots.

Aurora and XP.NETWORK bridge: a series of industry-firsts

The best tool for analyzing the flow of NFTs between Aurora and other chains is the XP.NETWORK Explorer. It’s the only blockchain explorer centered on NFTs, and it supports around 30 networks.

You can filter transactions by origin and destination chain, as well as type: Transfer stands for bridging, while Unfreeze means transferring back to the origin chain – at which point the NFT previously minted on the destination chain is burned, and the original NFT is released from the bridge contract.

As we can see here, so far 12 NFTs have been bridged from Aurora to other blockchains (as of August 2023). This seems like a few, but consider that these are all the NFTs that have ever been bridged from this blockchain anywhere. Rainbow Bridge doesn’t support NFTs – in fact, there are no other bridges that would support NFT transfers to or from Aurora. XP.NETWORK is the absolute pioneer in this regard – an impressive achievement.

In particular, we helped transfer several Aurora Punks – which is among the top-selling collections in the ecosystem. They were sent to BNB Chain. Another interesting transfer was an NFT from  John McAfee Legacy – the first collection to launch on ghostNFT, a cross-chain NFT platform that has introduced its own token standard, ERC721Envious. This NFT was bridged to Gnosis – a very interesting pairing indeed.

There has also been an NFT bridging transaction between Aurora and NEAR itself – our own experiment for now. Even though Aurora is an L2 for NEAR, they use very different NFT token standards and smart contract logic, so enabling NFT bridging between them was far more challenging than between Aurora and BNB Chain or Polygon, for example.

Because of the use of sharding, a single transaction on NEAR can be split between 3 blocks – which makes it more difficult to control the success of bridging. Of course, we did solve these issues in the end: the XP.NETWORK dev team, led by the tireless CTO Dima Brook, has more experience with NFT standards than anyone.

Let’s now take a look at the NFTs bridged from other chains to Aurora. We find quite a few Polkamon assets sent from BNB Chain (BSC), as well as Neon District from Polygon.

The most interesting, though - even exotic - are the two most recent transfers: Bored David from Gnosis and Meta Panthers from TON. TON is a non-EVM network, and it was a very gratifying experience for us to facilitate a transfer between yet another non-EVM network and Aurora: something that nobody has done before.

This case study should be a reminder that it’s not always about the sheer numbers - rather, it’s about doing something that moves the industry forward. For us at XP.NETWORK, the biggest reward is bridging chains that haven’t been bridged before, enabling NFT transfers that nobody has attempted before - in other words, bringing down barriers between blockchain “islands” to create a single unified NFT ecosystem.