For 10 years, the holy grail of blockchains has been runtime—a virtual machine that empowers builders to deploy programmable logic on-chain.

However, the runtime vision is becoming obsolete.

Our industry is shifting toward a whole new paradigm: agentic contracts 🧵 Smart contracts allow for programmable money but come with serious limitations: they need to be executed consistently (can only access data inside a blockchain) and quickly (within a block’s timeframe).

This is a 🧵 about Aurora Cloud and why it's superior to any L2 stack.
TL;DR: decentralised sequencer, built-in composability between chains.

Read on for more details 👇 1/26 L2 narrative has been out there for many months. The only substantial reason for this is the scaling of the L1 blockchain.
L2s are not enabling new use cases. Nothing new would happen on L2s compared to L1. It's a band-aid.

🧵
Just minutes ago Aurora DAO has approved the update to AURORA token economy, marking a major milestone in the project development. The proposal was already heavily discussed by the community, but let me summarise it in this thread... 1/18 First of all, here's the link to the in-depth description of the update and the relevant discussion:
forum.aurora.dev/t/aurora-token…

A 🧵 on the recent precautionary pause of the Rainbow Bridge.

TL:DR: it was a bug in the NEAR Core, no funds lost; the vulnerability was never exploited on the Rainbow Bridge; operations of the bridge are fully restored.
@auroraisnear @NEARProtocol @PagodaPlatform 1/21 On the 10th of February a vulnerability was discovered in the NEAR Core.

Do you have the feeling that blockchains NGMI? And that they look like Ponzis?
In this 🧵 I will share my reflections on the topic and what we should do to change this sentiment.
TL; DR (spoiler): Fix blockchain UX and get them users. 1/38 Blockchains are platforms - places where users and businesses meet and produce value. A portion of this value is extracted into a cryptocurrency behind the blockchain.

A short transparency thread about Aurora wrt the Alameda / FTX exposure.
🧵 Alameda research directly invested in Aurora Labs. Their allocation is below 3.5M AURORA tokens vested over 3 years since AURORA TGE. This is below $1.75M at current AURORA market price.

🧵
This is a thread for entrepreneurs looking to leverage the benefits of blockchain, and facing the fundamentally important question — which network should I choose?

Let’s get started, and try to separate the signal from the noise. 1/27 When I asked over 100 teams "How did you choose your deployment chain?", the answers were:

→ 75%, brand awareness. They'd simply heard of the chain.
→ 20%, "encouragement" from their VCs.
→ 5%, some deeper, more considered reasoning.

I was shocked.

Decentralization. A core value of the blockchain. Though probably it is a distant future rather than the current situation. Or the opposite? This is a 🧵 about professional validators and why things are better with decentralization than it seems from the first sight. 1/24 Systems with a single managing actor is a norm for web2. A norm that in some cases is extremely harmful for the people who use these systems. It is enough to recall Cambridge Analytica or Wirecard cases.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_…

🧵 on the Rainbow Bridge attack during the weekend
TL; DR: similar to May attack; no user funds lost; attack was mitigated automatically within 31 seconds; attacker lost 5 ETH. 1/15 The rainbow bridge is based on trustless assumptions with no selected middleman to transfer messages or assets between chains. Because of this, anyone can interact with its' smart contracts, including the NEAR light client: etherscan.io/address/0x3be7…

You don't need to be born as L2, you can become an L2.

This is a thread about L2s, bridges and why Aurora architecture allows it to be treated as one of the best-designed Ethereum scalability solutions.
🧵 1/19 First, let's start with an L2 definition. I will use the most common one from @l2beat: an L2 is a chain that fully or partially derives its security from L1 Ethereum.
In short, zkSynk, Arbitrum and Optimism are L2s; Polygon is not.

A thread on clarifications around Aurora+ (A+) and it's functionality.
No TL;DR -- many different topics
🧵
@auroraisnear 1 / 24
If you didn't yet see the keynote, please spend 20 min on it. It really helps to understand what A+ is and where it is going.

🧵 This is a thread on the value accrual mechanisms for tokens.
TL; DR: network fees and forcing users to buy the base token have nothing in common with the value accrual; the value is in the ecosystem; AURORA staking helps distributing the value 1 / 23
I'll start with a disclaimer: everything that I write in my twitter threads is my personal opinion. Aurora protocol and AURORA token is managed by the Aurora DAO. Aurora Labs controls around 7.7% of the DAO decisions. Please make sure you understand the difference.

0/ 15
Great report by @Delphi_Digital !
However, for those who like to dig into details (and read the report), I have some additional insights.
🧵

https://twitter.com/Delphi_Digital/status/1522270215123308545

1 / 15
First of all, Delphi mentions that $NEAR is the ultimate token that accrues value.
I disagree with this point. On Ethereum $ETH accrues value, right? And then it is sold by miners into USD to pay the electricity bills. No problem in this, right?

🧵 on the Rainbow Bridge attack today.
TL;DR: attack was stopped automatically, no bridged funds lost, attacker lost some money, bridge architecture was designed to resist such attacks, additional measures to be taken to ensure the cost of an attack attempt is increased 1 / 18
The bridge attacker:

etherscan.io/address/0xa4b2…

got some ETH from Tornado to start the attack around 12h ago:
etherscan.io/tx/0x31978ff63…

CC: @rstormsf

The last three weeks introduced a drastic change in my life and I cannot be silent about it. Now I'm homeless, along with millions of others.
The thread is rough. But I have no other words for this. I cannot be polite when my people are dying.
🧵
1/25 First of all, many people are trying to check whether I'm alive. I am. And my family too. We moved out from Kharkiv on the second day of the invasion.

2/25

Some stats on the costs of fungible token NEAR <> Ethereum transfers over the #RainbowBridge. @NEARProtocol... Ethereum -> NEAR transfer consists of 3 transactions:
1. Ethereum: Approve ERC20 transfer
2. Ethereum: Lock ERC20
3. NEAR: Finalise deposit (mint tokens)