Aurora Engineering Recap June 2024

Read about Aurora's June 2024 engineering progress, featuring key infrastructure updates, research advancements, security improvements, and product updates.

These updates and improvements are part of our continuous effort to enhance the Aurora ecosystem, making it more efficient, secure, and user-friendly. Stay tuned for more exciting developments in the coming months!

Apps Team

Web3Wallet Project: Progress continues on the Web3Wallet project, focusing on onboarding, staking, and portfolio pages. Bugs have been fixed, and enhancements applied to the wallet connector. The release is planned for August.
Ethereum Wallets in NEAR Wallet Selector: The NEAR Wallet Selector now includes an option for Ethereum wallets, allowing the use of 0x EVM accounts on NEAR directly after the protocol change connected with Web3Wallet project.
RainbowBridge Updates: RainbowBridge now supports NEAR native tokens (NEP-141) bridging to Ethereum. Previously, only Ethereum native tokens could be bridged back to Ethereum.
Developer Onboarding Documentation: Comprehensive documentation on building a dApp on Aurora will be published in July. It includes basic smart contract examples (ERC-20, ERC-721) and tutorials on frontend development, such as connecting your wallet and calling contracts from React, based on the Wagmi library. A preview of the draft can be seen here. If you have any feedback or suggestions about it – please leave your message on our Discord server and mention @slava there.
Secret Project: Integrated with Aurora, with an AMA on X to discuss the details.
Aurora Cloud Data Oracle: Released and accompanied by a webinar with the Pyth team.

Engine

Cancun Release: New versions of the Aurora EVM and Aurora Engine have been released with Cancun support. The contract deployment is planned for August. More information about Cancun can be found here. Additionally, tests for all hard forks in Aurora EVM have been fixed.
ETH-Connector Split: The ETH-connector split is ready, but the release has been postponed to July. This change abstracts NEP-141 functionality from the Engine contract to a separate contract, making it reusable by any Aurora Chain on NEAR.
Bitcoin Light Client Development: The development for a Bitcoin Light Client, which allows developers to access Bitcoin network block information on NEAR and Aurora has been concluded. This opens new opportunities for projects unifying NEAR and Bitcoin networks.
Controller Contract: The Engine team is developing a controller contract to facilitate larger updates via the Aurora DAO contract. Currently, there is a 150TGas limit for code deployments, which restricts the direct deployment of any big contract, like the Aurora Engine, via DAO.

Infrastructure

NEAR RPC Speedup: The test servers have been updated and a rewritten guide for the best setup for validators has been completed. Additionally, the Aurora Labs team has been collaborating with the Pagoda team to further analyze streams and metrics to develop alternative tests and debug issues.
Web3 Wallet: Issues with mainnet deployment have been fixed, and support for deposit payments by relayers has been added. The Wallet Contract has also been updated. The mempool has been implemented and is currently under review. Bug fixes have been deployed, and the eth_getBalance function has been fixed. Currently the team is working on introducing changes to the mempool based on a recent design review call and have kickstarted the introduction of Redis for mempool and relayer filter storage.
Research Initiatives: Conducted research on container registry migration, MongoDB for block storage, Kubernetes for better automation, and protobufs with zstd vs classic JSON types. Improved Web3 tests monitoring for Aurora Mainnet/Testnet and Web3Wallet RPC in limited mode. Deployed services to track Aurora transaction execution time on NEAR and Aurora staking stats on Grafana.
Forwarder 2.0 Research: Investigating methods to bridge funds back to centralized exchanges (CEX) from NEAR/Aurora accounts (work in progress).
Improved RPC Tests Monitoring: Enhanced monitoring for Aurora Mainnet and Testnet endpoints, and implemented limited mode monitoring for Web3Wallet RPC.
Monitoring Boards in Grafana: Developed detailed monitoring boards in Grafana to track Aurora transaction execution time on Near and Aurora Staking Statistics, providing better visibility into system performance.

Research

Web3Wallet Audit Review: Focused on addressing tasks from the audit review.
Legacy EVM Accounts: Investigated and implemented fixes for legacy EVM accounts in Nearcore.
Chain Abstraction on Aurora: Explored the implications of Chain Abstraction on Aurora, particularly for cross-contract calls (XCC).
Cancun Release Review: Reviewed the Cancun release of the Engine to assess new features and improvements.
Stateless Validation Issue: Revisited the stateless validation chunk validator kickout problem to find potential solutions.

Security

SputnikVM Updates: EIP-7610 has been added to the SputnikVM, and nonce changing strategies have been discussed.
NEAR CLI Extension for Multisigs: Documentation for the Near CLI extension for multisigs has been published.
PipeFlare Support: Token bridging from Polygon to Aurora via the LayerZero protocol has been completed, and bug bounties are being managed.

That's a wrap for this month! Got tech-related questions? Join our Discord community, where you can discuss all things tech with us.

About Aurora

Powered by its high-performance EVM, and fully trustless Rainbow Bridge, Aurora combines an Ethereum compatible experience with the modern blockchain performance of NEAR Protocol. Aurora provides an optimal environment for the creation of scalable, carbon-neutral, future-safe, and low-cost Web3 services, as well as the perfect tools to bring to life your Web3 initiatives. Aurora’s flagship virtual blockchain solution Aurora Cloud, is designed from the ground up for businesses looking to seamlessly leverage Blockchain technology to provide a web2 experience on chain.