Aurora protocol team imposes transaction fees amid network congestion

Aurora, the second-layer protocol on the NEAR platform, began charging users transaction fees due to congestion. The minimum gas price has been set at 0.1 Gwei.

🧵An emergency update to all Aurora users with explanations.

TL; DR: Aurora RPC would accept transactions with gas price of 1 Gwei at least, starting 17:00 UTC today (in approx. 1h).

I’ll put it as a Socratic dialogue 🗨️

— Alex Shevchenko (@AlexAuroraDev) February 6, 2022

«The protocol is currently under extreme load, which leads to costs of 300 NEAR per hour (~$4,050/hour) for Aurora Labs (a minor issue), as well as the rejection of some user transactions and NEAR network congestion (a serious issue),» explained Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs.

According to him, 80% of transactions come from users of the recently launched Moonflower Farmers game — a fork of the popular Farmers Sunflower Farm.

Analyses indicated that real people are behind the activity, not bots, Shevchenko added.

«Blockchains typically solve this problem with a bit of logic. On Ethereum this is called the gas price auction: miners can select transactions to include in a block, so congestion drives up the gas price,» the developer reminded.

Aurora, the second-layer protocol on the NEAR platform, began charging users transaction fees due to congestion. The minimum gas price has been set at 0.1 Gwei.

«All of these things are abstracted away from users by the Aurora RPC, which accepts all transactions, even with zero fees,» emphasised Shevchenko.

To reduce network congestion among some users, developers decided to introduce a minimum gas fee. Depending on the results, it may be necessary to raise it from the initial 0.1 Gwei (~$0.0000003), said the head of Aurora Labs.

He added that the team has been working for several months on personalising user interactions with Aurora RPC, in order to assign individual gas prices while preserving a zero rate for the majority.

Shevchenko noted that users will now need some ETH to pay transaction fees. The asset can be purchased on the Aurora DEX or transferred via cross-chain bridge from Ethereum.

In May 2021, the NEAR Protocol team launched the L2 protocol Aurora.