[Proposal] Aurora Labs Grant Allocation for 2025

AuroraDAO
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1. Achievements of 2024

Aurora Labs Limited has successfully contributed to the development and maintenance of the Aurora Protocol throughout 2024, achieving significant milestones:

  • Advanced development of Aurora Cloud, aligning with the Aurora Cloud: Vision, and integrating token burn mechanics to enhance the AURORA token economy.
    • Development of a universal third-party onramp solution for Aurora Cloud;
    • Development and pending release of the universal third-party offramp solution for Aurora Cloud.
    • Release the forwarder enabling users to withdraw from centralized exchanges to any Virtual Chain powered by Aurora Cloud;
    • Development of a universal oracle leveraging the Pyth network;
    • Creation of a versatile widget that offers customers an easy-to-integrate solution for their applications to provide our onboarding methods (bridge, forwarder, and fiat onramp);
    • Aurora Cloud console improvement provides a user-friendly interface that enables customers to create and manage their virtual chains.
    • Development of the backend foundation to fully automate the deployment of the new virtual chains and enable a true self-serve experience.
  • Maintained and enhanced core services, including Aurora Plus and AuroraPass.dev, Rainbow Bridge Frontend, AURORA staking contracts, XCC SDK, and other ecosystem products.
    • Redesign of Aurora Pass and addition of improvements such as portfolio view, token price graph, and support of NEAR network as well as all virtual chains.
    • Redesign of the Aurora cloud website to better align with the virtual chain narrative.
  • Provided comprehensive user support and facilitated ecosystem coordination.
  • Ensured the security of the network and its services.
  • Delivered public RPC access, Aurora Explorer, and free transactions to Aurora Pass users.
  • Aurora Labs has begun developing and preparing to launch new products and features to expand the Aurora ecosystem, including the Front-End DEX generator, which is being scoped to allow all Virtual Chains to deploy their own DEX Front ends.
  • Total overhaul of the Aurora Pass Application with a refreshed UX, enhanced features including Portfolio performance tracking, delegation for dApps leveraging Aurora Pass, and the development of in-app activities including Staking, Swaps, and NFT management remain ongoing.
  • Aurora Labs is still designing and initiating the development of ecosystem treasury contracts and front end, supporting the approved AURORA 2.0 token economy.

Concerning Aurora Cloud, the following agreements have been signed during 2024:

NE Play is a digital entertainment ecosystem integrating gaming, esports, predictive gaming, and loyalty rewards. Powered by blockchain, it features free-to-play tournaments, a predictive gaming platform, a peer-to-peer marketplace, and a loyalty exchange. Users engage through NE Play Coins, with rewards and transactions enhancing the experience.

Optima Ventures specializes in strategic consulting and capital raising for Web3 and emerging technology companies. Their services include tailored fundraising strategies, investor relations, business development, and partnership facilitation. With a deep understanding of Web3 trends and an extensive network of investors and industry leaders, Optima Ventures aims to empower visionary founders to navigate the complexities of the Web3 ecosystem and achieve sustainable growth.

Rhodes Inc. offers a decentralized education platform designed to efficiently and afford high-quality learning experiences, aiming to transform traditional educational models.

Tokenomia.pro is a Web3 consulting and blockchain development firm specializing in designing and optimizing token economies through modeling and simulations. Their services include crypto economics, token engineering, dynamic tokenomics, incentive optimization, risk mitigation, and governance design. They cater to sectors such as DeFi, GameFi, DAOs, real-world asset tokenization, NFTs, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks. By integrating economic theory with advanced blockchain technologies, Tokenomia.pro aims to create sustainable and robust token-based systems tailored to client’s unique needs.

Arium is a cloud gaming platform enabling players to enjoy competitive games across devices without high-end hardware. It features popular titles, cross-play, and low-latency streaming, integrating Web3 technology for skill-based rewards and seamless access via browsers or apps.

Partnership agreements through affiliate programs either signed or in progress

An Affiliate Partner in the Aurora Ecosystem collaborates to expand its reach and adoption across sectors like DeFi, gaming, energy, tokenization, and NFTs. They promote Aurora’s scalable, Ethereum-compatible infrastructure, support innovation by onboarding projects, and foster connections with key stakeholders to drive growth and advance decentralized blockchain solutions.

PipeFlare is a play-to-earn gaming platform offering a variety of casual games where players can earn cryptocurrencies like 1FLR, ZEC, and MATIC. Users can participate in daily crypto faucets, weekly gaming leaderboards with over $2,000 in prizes, and a referral program. The platform also features an NFT marketplace for buying, selling, and trading gaming-related NFTs. PipeFlare is backed by Digital Currency Group, Horizen, and Horizen Labs, emphasizing its commitment to integrating Web 3.0 technologies and enhancing user control over gaming.

EGGO Quest Game is a Telegram mini-app in development, collaboratively created by the Parties to be deployed on the Aurora Protocol under this Agreement’s terms.

2. 2025 Grant Proposal

  1. Objective

To enable Aurora Labs Limited to continue its essential role as the development entity for the Aurora Protocol, we propose a grant allocation of 25,000,000 $AURORA. This funding will be used to:

  1. Accelerate R&D for Aurora Cloud and other ecosystem products in our target 1,000 virtual chains.
  2. Expand infrastructure to support large-scale operations and future innovations.
  3. Enhance workforce capabilities through training and recruitment of top-tier professionals.
  4. Promote ecosystem adoption through targeted marketing and partnerships with Web2 and Web3 companies.

Roadmap

We propose to focus on the following areas of development of Aurora technology stack: Core tech, Infrastructure, Integration, DevX and Decentralisation.

Core tech

  1. Replayer. Aurora technology stack is based on Aurora Engine – a smart contract that implements an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This smart contract requires continuous support and updates (inclusion of the recent changes in EVM, provided through Ethereum hardforks). The best way to test the correctness of updates for Aurora Engine is to run all Ethereum Mainnet (and other EVM-compatible networks) transactions through it. We propose to develop Replayer – a tool that would enable continuous testing of Aurora Engine by replaying Ethereum Mainnet (and other EVM-compatible chain) transactions. This tool would not only ensure full compatibility of Aurora stack with Ethereum, but also showcase the ability for Aurora stack to support many EVM-compatible chains at the same time.
  2. Privacy chains. Financial compliance often requires hiding sensitive information. This hinders the usage of blockchain for heavy regulated use cases. Development of the privacy chains that would allow keeping the state private, while still conserving some degree of interoperability with public infrastructure, may greatly simplify the path forward for such use cases.
  3. RPC scaling and optimization. The launch of a 1,000 Aurora virtual chains would require enormous effort in scaling public RPC infrastructure, which was never performed before by any of the RPC providers. Aurora Borealis RPC infrastructure developed over the past two years is a solid starting point to tackle this challenge. However, it needs to be scaled and optimised even more.
  4. Virtual Chain SDK. Aurora Virtual Chains, though being fully open sourced, are not a convenient tool for a set of developers who want to build a solution from the source code. This limits the creation of alternative for-profit BaaS products that utilise the power of virtual chains. Creation of a specialised Virtual Chain SDK can help 3rd party infrastructure providers to include Aurora tech stack in their propositions.

Besides these developments, Aurora Labs plans to contribute to the core tech of the NEAR protocol. Namely, adding native passkey support, adding dynamic resharding to NEAR consensus algorithm, designing the sharded contract standard and designing a sharded fungible tokens standard with private token balances. Besides that Aurora Labs is planning to continue the development of the NEAR Intents protocol started in 2024. These activities will be mostly funded by the NEAR foundation, however, since these are being beneficial to Aurora ecosystem too, some portion of the allocated funding may be used within these directions.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure area contains all the tech related to Virtual Chains and their operations.

  1. Core universal infrastructure. Every virtual chain needs a set of primitives. These include onramps, oracles and bridging – such services were developed in 2024. However, there are several other commonly used infrastructure pieces. Namely: custody solution, indexing service, multisig service, DeFi infrastructure, others. Aurora Labs plans to roll out these pieces one by one in 2025
  2. Gas Abstraction. The Aurora ecosystem is known for its experiments with gas management. We plan to continue extending the set of gas abstraction primitives available for Virtual Chains.
  3. Add-ons. Aurora Labs only would not be able to support the vast set of core infrastructure primitives that may be needed to all virtual chains. The proper solution to this problem would be creation of a marketplace, where partners would be able develop and deploy different addons. This may include the likes of: tokenization/RWA, Gaming, DeFi, Compliance, NFTs, Launchpads, AI and other addons.

Integration

The integration direction contains further development of core primitives that allow for connectivity of Virtual Chains with each other (Cross-Contract Calls or XCC) and with other blockchains (Chain Signatures and OmniBridge). This area includes also the integration of 3rd party interoperability solutions in the add-ons marketplace and wrapping existing ones (Wormhole, L0, Axelar) in a more convenient format.

Dev X

The developer experience area focuses on providing tools necessary for developers to use Aurora Virtual Chains stack as well as develop applications on top of it. A great supporting point for Aurora tech stack is that every Aurora Virtual Chain is EVM compatible, which means that an ordinary EVM developer can easily develop applications for Aurora stack. However there are several particular directions that we would like to emphasize:

  1. Support of the existing developer portal. Aurora stack brings in several unique technologies that imply educating developers about. These are: Cross-Contract Calls, Chain Signatures and Omni-bridge, NEAR Intents protocol, others. These solutions are described to certain level of detail in existing developer portal, however, they continue to be developed and thus require constant maintenance from the Dev X perspective.
  2. Public DevNet. In certain cases developers looking for a Virtual chain infrastructure would require a loaded instance of a Virtual Chain. It won’t be economically feasible to create a separate instance of such a chain for different parties. That’s why a public virtual chain DevNet is required for these use cases. A launch of such a solution is contingent on requests from the developers.
  3. No-code Dev Platform (with AI dApp builder). Development of applications becomes simpler and simpler over time, especially because of drastic progress of AI tooling. Development and launch of a separate No-code Dev Platform, empowered by AI tools might significantly simplify the creation of next generation dApps.

Decentralization

Every blockchain must take steps on the path of progressive decentralization and Aurora is not an exception. Aurora Labs plans to develop a token economy update proposal, and if it would be deemed useful and approved by Aurora DAO, implement it. This proposal will be heavily focused on including the Aurora Virtual Chains in AURORA token economy, while presenting the scalable revenue model for Aurora protocol. Aurora Labs intends to re-use the feature of AURORA staking that allows the distribution of the alternative tokens to AURORA stakers.

Besides that, Aurora Labs is planning to open an Ecosystem Accelerator in partnership with prominent companies. The goal of the accelerator would be to help early stage startups in Aurora ecosystem to mature and secure seed funding.

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