NEAR - 25. Aurora Contract Users
Let's dig into users that have interacted with the Aurora contract on NEAR. Let's look at how many distinct users have interacted with the contract. Additionally, break out contract interactions, user interactions, and unique user interactions by day. Include any additional insights about the usage of the Aurora contract on NEAR.
Aurora is a solution, that allows to execute Ethereum contracts in a more performant environment—NEAR blockchain, a modern layer-1 blockchain which is fast (2-3 second transaction finalization), scalable, and carbon neutral. Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implemented as a smart contract on NEAR Protocol. We are here to help scale Ethereum ecosystem for developers to operate their apps on an Ethereum-compatible, high-throughput, scalable, and future-safe platform, with low transaction costs for their users.
Aurora provides the Ethereum 1.0 development experience, with layer-2-like speed and scalability. If you are an Ethereum developer, getting started on Aurora is as easy as changing the RPC endpoint you interact with.
Aurora supports all tools available in the Ethereum ecosystem — MetaMask, Truffle, Hardhat, Remix, etc. Additionally, NEAR's trustless bridge to Ethereum means even the assets on Aurora are the same as Ethereum. For example, account balances in Aurora's EVM are denominated in the same Ether (ETH) as on Ethereum itself.
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application (dApp) platform and Ethereum competitor that focuses on developer and user-friendliness. Its native NEAR tokens are used to pay for transaction fees and storage on the Near crypto platform. NEAR is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that uses sharding technology to achieve scalability.
NEAR Protocol is a smart contract capable, public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that was conceptualized as a community-run cloud computing platform. Built by the NEAR Collective, NEAR was designed to host decentralized applications (dApps), and strives to compete with Ethereum and other leading smart contract-enabled blockchains like EOS and Polkadot. NEAR’s native token is also called NEAR, and is used to pay for transaction fees and storage. NEAR tokens can also be staked by token holders who participate in achieving network consensus as transaction validators.
NEAR Protocol is focused on creating a developer and user friendly platform. To accommodate this mission, NEAR has incorporated features like human-readable account names as opposed to only cryptographic wallet addresses, and the ability for new users to interact with dApps and smart contracts without requiring a wallet at all.
Projects building on NEAR include Mintbase, a non-fungible token (NFT) minting platform, and Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and more.

The right area chart illustrates the Aurora token price over time.
As can be seen, there is a significant increase on August 26, 2022, with approximately 1.05 dollars before reaching a peak of around 1.1 dollars on September 12, 2022. After that, this price gradually decreased until around the end of December 2022, with this price averaging around 0.19–0.23 dollars throughout the present.