About Aurora EVM.

As everyone knows, Ethereum is a fully-fledged blockchain with consensus, networking layers, nodes, and virtual machine. Aurora is the solution to extend the Ethereum ecosystem. It offers a fully compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for seamless application deployment for developers. It is fully operational and ready for projects to be deployed on it.

Aurora works on top of the NEAR blockchain, yet it provides the familiar experience of Ethereum for developers. They can take their Solidity contracts, deploy them on Aurora and enjoy the low cost and fast confirmation time of the NEAR blockchain. NEAR’s scalable environment will also result in horizontal scalability for Aurora.

Aurora also has a bridge — Rainbow Bridge — that connects Ethereum, NEAR, and Aurora. Through this bridge you can transfer ERC-20 tokens at no cost for the time being (fees are paid in the Ethereum network only with ETH being our base token).

We made the decision to implement Aurora as a smart contract on top of NEAR. The fact that it is a smart contract is a huge plus for the team that develops the product: we don’t need to take care of Consensus, Validators, Storage, Network, etc. All the execution has been already verified. In Aurora we don't have any nodes, we are not focused on building networks, acquiring validators etc. Besides, we connected this virtual machine to the storage that is also provided by NEAR. All this means that we can iterate quickly and deploy new features insanely fast. Everything will work well as long as everything works in the NEAR network.