Aurora Engineering Recap September 2024
We are excited to share the latest developments from the Aurora Engineering teams. This September brought significant progress across various key areas, from enhancing user experience with new features to resolving technical challenges. Here’s a detailed look at the updates from our Apps, Product, Engine, and Infrastructure teams.
We are excited to share the latest developments from the Aurora Engineering teams. This September brought significant progress across various key areas, from enhancing user experience with new features to resolving technical challenges. Here’s a detailed look at the updates from our Apps, Product, Engine, and Infrastructure teams. Whether you’re a developer, user, or part of the Aurora ecosystem, these improvements are set to enhance your experience and open up new possibilities.
Let’s dive into the latest achievements and what’s coming next!
Apps Team
- Aurora Cloud Console: Added API endpoints for generating and retrieving Forwarder addresses. Forwarder is a tool for the instant deposits from Centralised Exchanges to your virtual chains.
- Aurora Pass: Release of a new design of the app will happen really soon. This will help team to support staking, swapping, NFTs right inside the app. New features will include:
- Compatibility with Near dApps. User can log into Near dApps using Aurora Pass and the NEP-518.
- Portfolio view: displays coins from all of the virtual chains and Near.
- Detailed token page with price graph
- A new Explore page where users can discover all apps from the ecosystem
Improvements:
- A new navigation bar to better organise the functionalities
- A dedicated history page with all transactions
- Enhanced transaction information
- Rainbow Bridge: Added USDT/USDC swapping: on Aurora/NEAR you have 4 types of USDC/USDT stablecoins – Near-native and Ethereum-native ones, read more about that here. To simplify the user experience we have added a popup allowing you to swap your Near native token, like USDC to the Ethereum-native ones USDC.e and bridge them to Ethereum after that. So there is no need to go to DEXes to swap these there.
- Aurora Plus: You can now buy AURORA tokens through Munzen.
Product Team
- We have visited the EthMilan 🇮🇹: connected with new DeFi, AI, and Web3 Gaming projects and talked about how virtual chains can power these.
Engine Team
- Fixed EVM deployments with the Aurora DAO Contract: a deployment contract was released on Aurora Mainnet. Before this we had 150TGas limit (on Near) for the code deployments done with Aurora DAO contract, and so the latest releases couldn’t have been done with it.
- Fixed the issue with displaying Rainbow Bridge transactions of the ERC-20 tokens in the direction from Ethereum to Aurora in the Explorer (we still need to add correct data from the RawTrace there and fix the same issue for ETH). https://explorer.mainnet.aurora.dev/tx/0xc549c38da0919fc0cbe05100a7f803bf64df7ce7baf1392cfff9bdedc0402f83
- Resolved an issue with the eth_estimateGas function: It began with an XCC-related support ticket on Discord, where a developer was incorrectly calling the callback function directly, instead of from within other smart contract methods as required. While addressing this, we discovered a separate issue with the eth_estimateGas function itself, where the eth_call method was being misused, leading to occasional incorrect gas estimations. Both issues have now been fixed.
We’re looking for the Rust Devs: to join our Engine Team and help us work on the EVM updates.
Infrastructure Team
- Upcoming update for the standalone-rpc repository: RPC Node Providers will soon have access to an indexer option with zero storage requirements and no request fees. This indexer will streamline the process of retrieving NEAR blocks directly to your Aurora RPC server. The release is scheduled for the end of October, bringing more efficiency and cost-effectiveness to node operations.
Learn More:
- Significant improvement of the error messages on our RPCs: previously, developers frequently encountered the vague ERR_INVALID message, providing little insight into transaction failures. With only about 10 error types, this led to confusion and slower troubleshooting. Now, with over 30 distinct error types and more detailed context in each message, developers can more easily identify and resolve issues. You can find the full list of updated error messages here.
- Finished the RPC Speedup project report: this project was aimed to enhance block distribution latency on NEAR RPC nodes by using caching mechanism. The results after tests were around 30% improvement on average, which can grow up to 70% if all of the validators will be onboarded.