October 14th, 2021 at 1:00 pm UTC · 3 min read
Aurora, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for scaling decentralized applications built on NEAR, recently closed its first round of funding by raising a total of $12 million. Over 100 investors, including Pantera Capital and Electric Capital, took part in the funding round in support of Aurora’s mission of becoming a seamless Ethereum-scaling solution.
Alex Shevchenko, Aurora CEO, said:
“Our goal at Aurora has been to create a future where the obvious gaps between blockchains, developers and users are seamlessly bridged. The success of this funding reinforces Aurora’s appeal among our community and our objective to bring scaling solutions across the crypto ecosystem. We’re looking forward to bringing on the next level of innovation in this exciting space.”
While Aurora utilizes NEAR as its foundation, it has always envisioned a future in which projects can move flawlessly between blockchains to suit their needs. Aurora is an Ethereum-compatible platform that provides developers and users the experience of Ethereum on top of NEAR Protocol. It combines two pieces of technology to create a seamless experience: a full-featured Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and a powerful cross-chain bridge. Developers can launch their Ethereum decentralized applications on Aurora within minutes by linking to other Ethereum contracts and assets.
Such Ethereum ecosystem projects as Zero Knowledge Validation, Global Coin Ventures, imToken, Chronicle, and others took part in the round. Coupled with the use of ETH as the base token, this illustrates Aurora’s vision of supporting and helping scale Ethereum projects. Other products in development at Aurora include the integration of a price oracle, data indexer, AMM exchange, block explorer, among many others. Recently, Etherscan – a block explorer and analytics platform – announced that it will be launching on Aurora.
Aurora plans to use the investment to enhance its cross-chain functionality abilities that offer a multi-chain space with greater access for people worldwide, and to expand its team of developers.
Aurora’s development team spun off from NEAR as a separate entity in July 2021 with the goal of the continuing development of the EVM and Rainbow Bridge which launched on NEAR earlier this year. Before the project coalesced, Aurora CEO Alex Shevchenko led Ethereum-related initiatives at NEAR along with 20 year industry veterans such as Arto Bendiken, Frank Braun, and Joshua J. Bouw, who is heralded as “The Godfather of Proof of Stake” for his early role in the development of Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms.
For a roadmap of Aurora projects in the works or to apply for a career at Aurora, visit Aurora website.
Aurora is an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) built atop NEAR Protocol. The company has developed the Aurora Bridge for transferring assets between Ethereum and Aurora. Aurora Labs also maintains the Rainbow Bridge, which allows users to bridge assets between the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains.
Aurora is not only expanding Ethereum, it is scalable itself. Aurora utilizes NEAR, an environment with a possibility of dynamic resharding, which will result in horizontal scalability of Aurora. This aligns Aurora goals with those of Ethereum 2.0. Creating a sharded EVM runtime would be the next big step in blockchain technologies.
Aurora strives to design tools that are as smooth as possible for developers and users alike. The project offers full Ethereum 1.0 compatibility, allowing for deployments instead of migrations because of their use of ETH as a base token.
Aurora’s goal has always been to contribute to blockchain scalability with the relentless execution approach. The team remains committed to this goal and promises to deliver more big news in the near future.